DVCS systems have become popular amongst agile developers over the past few years. However they have mainly lived either in open source projects (often hosted on GitHub or BitBucket) or on smaller teams that would then promote code into the “authorized” or corporate repository. DVCS systems provide advantages in performance for branch and merge operations thus enabling a smoother workflow during refactoring and with teams that may be distributed. The key challenge has been a lack of enterprise tooling to both understand code evolution/history and more importantly support for user access control.
Over the last 6 months we have seen significant investment into support for Git and Mercurial and other vendors who have been delivering commercial DVCS systems (e.g. PlasticSCM). 3 key examples include:
- Accurev – Kando lets you visual branching and process, and provide access control and lets Git repositories to run and be managed in parallel with Accrev native repositories
- Collabnet – has integrated Git to TeamForge providing authentication, a master repository, and life-cycle integration
- Atlassian – new Git-based Stash product provides user and repository management and code traceability between Jira issues and changesets
This growing support will speed migration for organizations that currently use Subversion but are struggling with branch/merge overhead.
