What is version control and why is it beneficial?

Hi everyone, welcome back. Version control is a software tool that is used to manage and track code. Version control is a great tool that helps software development teams collaborate with the same code base. It can also be used to manage different environments for a project. Version control can also be known as revision control, or source control.

History

Version control keeps a change history of each file within a project. Changes made throughout several years by several different developers will all be shown in the history. This includes new files being added and old files being deleted. The history includes the name of the author, the date it has been revised and what was changed within the file. Previous versions of the same file can be found within the history which can be helpful when attempting to fix a bug.

Development

With the use of branching and merging, a team can work on the same codebase concurrently, sometimes even the same files. Creating a branch makes a copy of the code from the ‘master’ branch and allows developers to perform tasks on their own individual branches. After their task is complete, a branch can be merged into another branch to pool in all the changes together. Creating multiple branches allow developers to work independently without…