The old way of software development where the release engineers ran from one mates to another mates to keep track on Developers to know which module they are working and when they changed something in the code or which bugs has been tracked or fixed. No doubt, that process was pathetic, stressful, filled with issues and errors.

But, now things have changed. This is the era of DevOps where everyone works as a Team and collaborate with each other and use various tools in the Software Development Lifecycle. So, today we are going to discuss on one of the most important tool called by name Code Management Tools. In this article we will see top 5 open source code management tools which are mostly used by DevOps professionals these days.

But before going further lets see what is source code management?

Code management is actually a process of handling or managing changes to source code over time with the help of softwares or tools. These softwares keeps track of every changes and modifications in the code which is made by developers frequently. If there is some kind of mistakes made by developers they can simply go back compare it with previously written code and fix the mistakes easily. With the help of code management tools Developers team can work on different features and on bug fixing simultaneously by changing code with out disrupting team members. In other words you can say It give developers the ability to work concurrently on files (in branches that may or may not converge) without conflicting each other and also give developers the ability to merge changes with other developers’ changes, to track and audit changes that were requested and made, to track bug-fix status and to perform releases.

So now the question is which code management tools to use. When you search for the options you will get hundred of tools in your search results. To make this job easy for you we have done some research and make this list of Top 5 Open Source Code Management tools.

1. Subversion

• Open Source
• Merge tracking
• Renamed/copied/moved/removed files retain full revision history.
• Google Code even uses SVN
• Path-based authorization
• Language bindings for C#, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, and Java
• Changelists to organize commits into commit groups

2. GIT

• open source
• cheap local branching
• fast performance
• multiple workflows
• convenient staging areas

• open source
• fast and powerful
• easy to learn
• functions are less complicated
• integrated web-interface

4. Github

• Open Source
• Code review
• Issue tracking with labels, milestones
• largest host of source code in the world
• Commits history
• Graphs: pulse, contributors, commits, code frequency, punch card, network, members
• Unified and split diffs

5. CVS

• Open Source
• Easy to learn
• Google still hosts the original Usenet post that announced CVS
• Maintains a central repository of the most recent repository
• CVS allows to rollback any commit in the repository, even if this may require some time
• CVS uses a client–server architecture
• CVS can also maintain different “branches” of a project
• Several developers may work on the same project concurrently

Code Management these days plays an important role in development process and especially when team (large / small) works on single application. So, choose it wisely. Now , its your turn if you think this list should contain some other tools instead of this than write below in the comment box.