What to ask your agency about version control

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on version control, these questions are worth asking early.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Small commits with clear messages are a gift to future you. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

If it is not in version control, it does not exist. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Three things worth confirming about version control before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• If it is not in version control, it does not exist — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.