How to convince a company to switch their Source Control [closed]

Answer 1

In addition to the technical points given in other answers, there may be non-technical reasons lurking that you should be prepared to respond to:

You should investigate whether your company has any sort of policy against (or misguided fear of) open source software. If the company or its lawyers don’t understand the ins and outs of which licenses “infect” proprietary code and which don’t, as well as what you can do with open source code that doesn’t affect your proprietary code, you will have a hard time getting them to switch from a proprietary to an an open source tool. (And you may have a bigger education job on your hands.)

In arguing for the switch from proprietary (e.g. VSS) to open source (e.g. subversion) you’ll also need to be prepared to defend the quality of the code and the lack of any need for a warranty or other contract rights regarding the code.

Answer 2

@Adam Davis: Uhhh actually Adam, VSS is a horrible source control system. It has a long history of corrupting history and losing data. It is terrible at merging, doesn't handle multiple developers well and is very slow. Also the history is poor. Microsoft don't really support it any more, you'll note that they never used it for their own internal development and now they don't even sell it in favour of a more modern solution (VSTS). In short, if you have to choose between VSS and any other type of source control, go with the alternative.

Answer 3

@Jason: VSS is broken.

I think the most powerful method for motivating a change away from VSS is to point out how critical an asset your source code is. Taking risks with its integrity is not a wise business choice.

Add that your programmers are the creators of this asset, and that making it easier for them to be productive means more value in your source code asset. Joel on Software often talks about how investing in his programmers is a big win for his company.

The other answers here all describe specific reasons that you can point to when making your case.

Answer 4

By just going over the features good source control brings:

• ability to easily see logs of who did what, when, and in what order, to which files
• keep a history of past versions of everything
• easily go back and reproduce a specific version of your files from any past version, to more easily reproduce bugs reported in older versions
• ability go retrieve deleted code, or remove unwanted changes, without having to worry about losing data in the process

Answer 5

Even if it ain't broke, there's a potential benefit to migrating from VSS. First and most trivially, you won't have to buy new VSS licenses. Second, there are many examples of deficiencies in the VSS product (some also acknowledged by MS). The learning curve for SVN is at least as low as for VSS, and if you have devs happier with their source control system, they're more likely to use it early and often. That will translate to lots less risk for your company, and that's a good benefit.

Answer 6

Get them to google for 'vss problem', 'source safe corruption' or simply look at the Wiki page for it. That ought to convince them that it's probably not a long-term viable thing for you to be betting such a vital part of your business on.

How big is your team? (ie, I mean how many members, not whether or not you're salad dodgers) Once you start to get more than half a dozen quite active users, VSS is going to give you headaches.

I seriously doubt that Microsoft use it (in fact, don't they use a customised Subversion or CVS variant?) and you've got to ask yourself - if the company don't eat their own dogfood, why would you eat it?