Version Control in Multivendor Projects

Today's businesses focus on their core competences and buy all other business functions from other companies. Multisourcing happens when a project is divided between more than one company. Some companies are created to purely answer to these outsourcing needs. Atostek Oy is one such company participating in many multisourcing projects. While outsourcing might seem like an easy way to handle non-essential business functions, it does require planning, organizing and communication from the company doing the outsourcing as well as the company the function is outsourced to. This adds challenges to the project managers on all ends. Version control is essential in all software projects. It is essential that each version is tracked and accessible. Nowadays software projects are often so large that it is important for multiple developers to collaborate on them and therefore have access to all versions of the software. Often version control has been handled using a centralized version control system. In these cases each company participating in a multivendor project sets up their own version control system and work on only their part of the software. The interfaces between parts and all communication about the project, such as documents and contracts, are shared between companies via another method. Nowadays distributed version control systems are becoming increasingly popular and o er multiple alternative ways of setting up the version control mechanism within a company as well as between companies. In this thesis, multivendor projects that Atostek Oy participates in are investigated. First a study is conducted to see how the multivendor projects are managed. Then three projects are focused on especially, because the projects have decided to investigate which version control mechanism would be the best to suit the project's needs. Based on these a checklist for managing the different aspects of project management and a comparison of version control system archtypes are created