In a recent IT Week article “SCM brings developers under control” Chris Seiwald of Perforce notes that SCM is gaining more interest as a result of more distributed development.

Chris notes that with this distributed development there is a greater need for management control. Particularly in an outsourcing setting he claims that there is a recognition that bringing transparency to the development process through versioning, reporting, synchronisation and change tracking is seen as critical.

My own personal experience is that SCM is now seen as essential by most software developers - expect perhaps those who work on their own or have only recently entered the industry and may not even be aware that there is such a process.

The availability of open-source SCM tools such as CVS and now Subversion has increased awareness and lowered the adoption barrier. Prior to the emergence of these tools the cost of adopting SCM could have been prohibitive for smaller software shops - particularly those where a clear business case for SCM adoption couldn’t be made.

However, it’s still the case that I meet many software developers from the embedded community who are just starting out with the SCM. This is usually because their organisation has only recently started developing software or has just grown their team from a single developer. Hopefully SCM will become as pervasive in the embedded community as it now is in the enterprise and desktop software development world.