Martin Fowler

Source code is a vital asset to any software development team, and over the decades a set of source code management tools have been developed to keep code in shape. These tools allow changes to be tracked, so we recreate previous versions of the software and see how it develops over time. These tools are also central to the coordination of a team of multiple programmers, all working on a common codebase. By recording the changes each developer makes, these systems can keep track of many lines of work at once, and help developers work out how to merge these lines of work together.

This division of development into lines of work that split and merge is central to the workflow of software development teams, and several patterns have evolved to help us keep a handle on all this activity. Like most software patterns, few of them are gold standards that

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