Welcome back. In this lecture, we'll provide a brief overview of version control and its importance within software engineering projects to manage and maintain coding assets. Although there are many different software products and protocols available to implement version control, this course focuses on using Atlassian Bitbucket and its capabilities of acting as a distributed version control system through the use of the Git protocol, and with this in mind, we'll begin our review of version control and how it is performed using Git. Okay, let's begin. A version control system is used to manage source code and the changes that occur within source code over the course of time. Version control software maintains a history of change and modification for every tracked file in a specialized database. 

A version control system is a fundamental component of a functioning DevOps build pipeline. In fact, it is the first service that you should have in place. Without a modern version control system in place, software development in enterprise teams will be problematic, to say the very least. To ensure that everybody within the development team can code independently and in a manner where each and everyone's code is protected and mergeable, then, a version control system has to be used, and, as we will see in the coming slides, a version control system provides features to manage conflicts on the same file, that is, to be able to detect and merge coding changes that have occurred in the same file by different team members. This is a key point regarding version control systems, that anyone in the team can edit and change the same file at the same time, and then, later on, leverage the version control system to manage and merge those changes. A version control system is a must-have for any serious software development workshop. 

Git and Git-based tools are without doubt the most popular for version control, as per market share reports. The fact that Git by its very nature is a distributed version control system promotes collaboration amongst distributed development teams. The benefits of using a version control system are numerous. Let's cover off a few of them. Productivity and collaboration. Different developers can work on the same file at the same time, later merging their changes within the version control system. This ensures that no one file becomes a bottleneck in the overall software development project. Versioning. Every file that has been checked into the version control system has a complete, long-term history of change, regardless of which developer made the change. Versioning tracks not just the code changes, but includes creation and deletion of files and tracks metadata about the change, such as the date when the change was committed back into the version control system. Auditing. Code changes can be tracked and traced back to individuals to understand who made what and when. Additionally, changes within the version control system can be cross-referenced and connected into other project management tools and-or issue tracking applications. Differencing. Different versions of the same source code file can be examined to determine and observe what differences exist. Branching and merging allows you to maintain independent streams of development effort for all files within a given repository. 

This is useful for when different developers build new features independently that touch multiple files. And finally, backups. By virtue of using a distributed version control system such as Git, you have the same source code distributed amongst many team members, which, in a way, provides you with a method to recover all source code should either the central repository become broken and-or any individual local copies of the same repository. We've now covered off the basics of version control and how Git provides many important features to manage and maintain your coding assets. In the next lecture, we'll provide insights to all common Git commands, ranging from initializing and cloning a Git repository, branching and merging, through to logging and reviewing history. If you're already familiar with Git and the associated Git commands, feel free to skip ahead to the Bitbucket-specific lectures ahead. Okay, the version control introduction has now been completed. Go ahead and close this lecture, and we will see you shortly in the next one, where we deep dive into Git itself.