Steve Jones shares a tale of woe related to source control neglect:
One of the first things I found was that all our stored procedures in the production server were encrypted. I wasn’t sure why, since we hosted our machines, but that wasn’t a big deal.
Until it was.
One day we had an issue on one of our SQL Server 2000 servers (we had two, supposedly identical). In troubleshooting and putting some sample data in both systems for a fake customer, we got different results. Hmmm, not what I wanted to see.
I checked the VCS (SourceSafe at the time) and checked out the code. I then loaded my test data and … got a third, different result. Now I was concerned as this was a production bug that was delaying work for a customer.
I’ve become convinced over the past few years that having all of your code in source control (including database scripts!) is a key differentiator between a good work situation and a bad work situation.