Working in groups is tough. “Disagreements” and “Miscommunications” are commonplace, and even without any work-based problems cropping up some people just don’t work well together. Teams will also come across the same overall problems as individuals do. Whether it’s taking ideas in the wrong direction or making a complete mess of one element of the project. Managing the wealth of files and changes made to a project is a huge task, one made elementary by Subversion, which offers complete control of the growth of a project by tracking every change made to it from start to finish.

The idea is that any work performed on files is rarely suited to teams making individual changes alongside one another. Assuming the file is a text document of some form or another and every team member spends a day working on their own copy of the file by day’s end every document will be entirely different. And so without the ability to use software to merge the documents, making one document which is the most reasonable compromise of all the changed and unchanged text, merging the texts would be almost as time-consuming as writing them. This problem approaches the impossible when working with files that are not text, like images or binary files.

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Programmers, being one of the primary groups that would need to collaborate on individual files, were targeted primarily as the people for whom solutions to be developed. Recognizing the limitations of collaboration developers sought to combat them not only through creating software like Subversion but through changes in the style and in the methods of programming. The theory is that a project will go through a number of drafts, or versions, each with very different changes made each time. In a collaborative project each revision may be submitted by a different person, and this ‘versioning’ combines all the changes made.