Task-Driven Development

DVCS (distributed version control system), is the buzzword on all programmers' forums these days. Git and Mercurial contributed majorly to get tons of developers interested in DVCS. What's even more important, they got people interested in branching and merging. The branch-per-task approach is the core workflow used by most of the DVCS practitioners (including Plastic SCM). This has less to do with the fact that these systems can work in a distributed way and more to do with their actual ability to handle branching and (especially) merging correctly. Many DVCSs handle branching and merging well, but the branch-per-task pattern is not restricted to distributed systems. Centralized systems are equally capable of using the same pattern, however, many of these, like Subversion, CVS, TFS, and Perforce, have inadequate branching and merging functionality that's questionable at best.