Experiences with Distributed Version Control - Ready for the Enterprise?

Thursday 25 November, 2010

Presented by Dan North, Agile troublemaker, developer and originator of BDD

This was a joint event with the BCS Open Source SG.

See the following links for:

• Dan's Presentation
• An streaming-audio recording of the session

A full transcript of the talk is available below or here (new page)

Synopsis

Big organisations like to centralise. They like the control and management of centralised services. Distributed source code management (DSCM) systems such as git and mercurial represent a potentially disruptive shift in version control. Dan has been using DSCMs for his personal projects for a couple of years now, and recently his company - a 500 person trading firm - took the decision to embrace DSCM and begin the migration towards git from its centralised, monolithic Subversion repository.

In this talk, Dan outlines some of the differences between centralised and distributed version control systems, from a technical, social and organisational perspective, and describes some of the challenges of migrating towards and using DSCM successfully in a commercial setting.

Bio

Dan writes software and coaches teams in agile and lean methods. He believes in putting people first and writing simple, pragmatic software. He believes that most problems that teams face are about communication, and all the others are too. This is why he puts so much emphasis on "getting the words right", and why he is so passionate about behaviour-driven development, communication and how people learn. He has been working in the IT industry since he graduated in 1991, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.

Time and Location

The presentation was at the BCS London Office, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA

PROGRAMME

Thursday 25 November 2010