Source code management (SCM) is used to track modifications to a source code repository. SCM tracks a running history of changes to a code base and helps resolve conflicts when merging updates from multiple contributors. SCM is also synonymous with Version control.

As software projects grow in lines of code and contributor head count, the costs of communication overhead and management complexity also grow. SCM is a critical tool to alleviate the organizational strain of growing development costs.

In addition to version control SCM provides a suite of other helpful features to make collaborative code development a more user friendly experience. Once SCM has started tracking all the changes to a project over time, a detailed historical record of the projects life is created. This historical record can then be used to ‘undo’ changes to the codebase. The SCM can instantly revert the codebase back to a previous point in time. This is extremely valuable for preventing regressions on updates and undoing mistakes.

The SCM archive of every change over a project's life time provides valuable record keeping for a project's release version notes. A clean and maintained SCM history log can be used interchangeably as release notes. This offers insight and transparency into the progress of a project that can be shared with end users or non-development teams.

SCM will reduce a team’s communication overhead and increase release velocity. Without SCM development is slower because contributors have to take extra effort to plan a non-overlapping sequence of develop for release. With SCM developers can work independently on separate branches of feature development, eventually merging them together.

Overall SCM is a huge aid to engineering teams that will lower development costs by allowing engineering resources to execute more efficiently. SCM is a must have in the modern age of software development. Professional teams use version control and your team should too.