Which Version Control System do you currently use?
This year’s results continue to provide an interesting insight into FB user’s version control tool of choice.
Most notably:
- Subversion has successfully grown to become number 1 among our customers. This is only a few years after trailing SourceSafe significantly in our 2005 survey.
- Despite the efforts of some influential commentators in the developer community (one in particular comes to mind), SourceSafe continues to be a very popular VCS, at least among FinalBuilder customers.
- It’s interesting, and quite surprising, to see the number of FB users who choose not to use a version control system. We tend to think of FB users as very savvy developers who seek out tools and technologies to improve their productivity, the type of developers some people generally include in the controversial 20% category. However, a surprisingly large number seem to choose not to use version control. I deliberately say choose, because I imagine every developer using FB is well and truly aware of both the options and benefits of using source control.
- TFS hasn’t come close to SourceSafe in adoption among FB users. I may be told I'm comparing apples with oranges, but it doesn't even look like adoption has grown much since 2006.
A few caveats about comparing this year's results with those of previous years. Each year’s survey has a random sample. This year, the VCS question was also worded slightly differently to that used in previous years.
In any case, it’s great to know that FinalBuilder supports all of the top 10 Source Control systems, in addition to many others.
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This is the 2nd post in a series discussing insights uncovered in the 2008 FinalBuilder survey. Future posts will look at testing tool usage, Vista adoption and the pervasiveness of Continuous Integration.