Item: Git
Rating: 10
Author: Joshua Weaver

Overall Satisfaction with Git

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Git manages the source control over all of our web-related codebases. It allows us to be light and flexible with our approach to not only development and coding, but also using a continuous integration workflow that automates processes in the deployment chain. Without Git, life as a developer would be quite painful indeed.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It handles many of the complicated features of version control for you like merging branches
It has a diverse ecosystem of tools that utilize its many features
Documentation for Git and its workflows can be quickly found and understood

Cons

Some of the commands are a little obtuse if you're not using a Git Client
Since Git is so widely used in the development space, it's easy to believe that growth and innovation might become stale in the area of version control. Competition is sparse these days and I'm curious if this "Standard" is going to keep moving forward somehow.
It's hard to fault a tool that is so ubiquitous and hardly gets in your way.

Return on Investment

Git has definitely helped me save time as a developer
It has allowed me to remove myself from issues that would be present if I were managing code in and "old-fashioned" way of simply various folders and files.
Keeping good records and file history intact is a way to give yourself and your company peace of mind and reduce stress

Alternatives Considered

Git is pretty much the main choice today when choosing a source control system. There are still others out there like Subversion and Mercurial, however I have not evaluated these as they are older than Git and I tend to try to stay on the leading edge of what is in use for the web.

Other Software Used

Stripe, AWS Lambda, Jixee

Likelihood to Recommend

If you're developing any software that requires the need of keeping the source code around, then you should be using Git. The only time I can think of an instance where I might suggest not using Git is when you deal with an integrated and closed development environment where the source code is tightly held and managed within the IDE or environment itself. This type of development is rare these days but does still exist. As such, it would take extra measures to extract the source code out of the environment to then be able to utilize the benefits of Git.
Everyone else should utilize Git because it helps in many aspects of Source Control, for example:

Feature Branches during development
Forking entirely new versions of projects
Merging changes
Reviewing Commit histories and changes
Rolling back changes

Comments

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Git Things Done: The Current Standard in Version Control