Chapter 12. Development Process Policies

A version control system is just one of the many tools that are used in your development process. Certainly, it is an important tool, and a good version control system is vital to an effective development methodology, but even the best VCS is still only as effective as the process it is used in. In Part IV, I will examine the many aspects of the software development process, and the ways in which Subversion can best fit into those policies. By the end, you should have a solid grasp on the concepts necessary to design your own development process to fit Subversion into your development environment.

Any good process is made up of policies that proscribe what should be done in certain situations. Therefore, if you are going to design your development process to make use of Subversion, it only makes sense to start by looking at the policies that should be considered when integrating with version control. In this chapter, we'll examine different version control policies and how they should be integrated into an overall software development process.