Software Development without Source Control?

You'd think that every single company that does anything with software development would be using some form of source code control.

Not quite so. Just recently I spent a few days helping a customer that has 3 software developers and many different applications, both web and desktop apps. To my surprise they were not using any source control. I was quite shocked. At the end of each day, I had to upload my code to my web mail, just to be sure it doesn't get lost if my laptop crashes or gets stolen.

They explained that they almost never work on the same application with more than one developer and that their production environment always has the latest code deployed to it. Well, for web applications, because they are using ASP.NET Websites (as opposed to ASP.NET web applications) and they deploy all their source code into production environment, at least they have their source code relatively safe. But for  desktop applications, this is obviously not the case, because a desktop app must first be compiled.

There are of course many advantages to using source code control. To name just a few:

1. Source code (which is one of the main assets of any software project) is safely stored and hopefully regularly backed up, so that it does not get lost.
2. Every developer has access to the latest version of the source code, without having to copy files from one developer to another.
3. Source control systems maintain a history of changes to the source code, so that it's always possible to see who, when and how changed the code. And often, if developers are disciplined enough to comment before checking-in their code, one can even deduce why certain changes were maid.
4. Using source control, source code can be versioned and labeled, so that one can easily see what code is part of what version of the product.
5. There are more advanced source control features that can greatly improve the software development cycle, such as branching and check-in policies.

Delta-N, the company that I work for, specializes in Microsoft TFS (Team Foundation Server), which is an excellent source control system, but is also much much more. We've already made an appointment with this particular customer to see if we can help them set up source control!