Azavea’s development team constantly relies upon Software Configuration Management (SCM) software to author robust and dependable software. Whether development happens in Philadelphia, Seattle, Vermont or on the road, a copy of Subversion, running off a server in the office maintains logs and copies of code for collaborative, secure, and redundant storage. As all of Azavea’s developers are seldom in the office at the same time, maintaining a central repository is critical to the integrity of Azavea’s products and solutions. With the addition of TortoiseSVN, developers can write code from anywhere in the world that has access to the web, and easily manage their checked out versions of code in a familiar Windows environment.

It doesn’t matter if someone changed some code last week or last year, Subversion keeps track of those changes, and even includes a “blame” feature. Making each developer accountable for his or her changes maintains a higher quality of code, as each developer writes code with this informal contract in mind. This accelerates the Azavea development lifecycle when multiple developers work on one project. Not only because there are more people on a project, but because they constantly update the common code base, implementing application features in parallel. The resulting collaborative effort produces a shorter development time and quicker delivery to Azavea’s clients.