Refactoring is one of the most successful agile best practices. Nowadays software teams all around the world, and not only agile ones, are applying refactors to improve the quality of their source code.

Unfortunately not all the version control systems help doing refactoring, neither project reorganization. Most of them have big troubles dealing with renames and element moves, so at the end of the day they totally discourage any kind of refactor or project reorganization.

Consider the sample in the figure. A project has a certain structure and at a given moment two developers will work on two different tasks:

• Mark will fix a bug tracked in the bug database as bug 101. It will involve modifying the file /extension.cpp
• John will perform a certain refactor to clean up a previous design change. He will decide to move /extensions.cpp to /handler/extension.cpp

If you are thinking both changes can't be done in parallel you are probably used to one of the limited tools mentioned above.

With Plastic SCM both developers can work in parallel in separate branches (they could be also done on a single branch, but one of the Plastic key capabilities is his ability to perform fast branching and intelligent merging) without having to worry about what the other is changing. They have just to focus on their current tasks.

Once they finish their tasks and integrate the code back into the main branch, the file extension.cpp will be located under the /handler directory, but it will contain both the changes performed by John and the ones made by Mark!

Systems like CVS, SourceSafe, Subversion and even Perforce won't be able to handle this scenario. They will loose the changes of one of the contributors. Hence they are just forcing developers to avoid project reorganization or any sort of refactoring that involves file or directory moving. For instance refactors in Java code, where a change in a class name forces a change in its corresponding file, will become a painful process.

Plastic SCM provides high end SCM capabilities that give developers full freedom to implement best practices and boost both code quality and productivity.