Review of SCM & VCS

The basic need for both Version Control Systems (VCS) & Software Configuration Management (SCM) have been needed since the beginning of programming. However in recent years more mature products have hit the market and are worth considering.

1. CVS - old school basic VCS. Not much to delve into here, a quality product. It is a client-server system which is a plus, has no SCM capabilities & is known to have encoding issues from different platforms, basic security implementation. Overall a descent VCS.
   
2. SVN (subversion) - seen as the successor to CVS. Architecture is also client-server, can use HTTP through Apache. No SCM & basic security implementation. A quality VCS.
   
3. VSS (Visual SourceSafe) - basic VCS, some basic security, flawed design requires users read/write access to directories, leaving repository open to tampering. Architecture is client based. Probably the worst of all offerings, however good integration into Visual Studio is cheap and is better than nother.
   
4. StarTeam - my personal favorite, works with Eclipse, Visual Studio, Togethersoft & many other IDEs. Provides full VCS & SCM. This is a very mature product. Integration is seamless & is more intuitive than MS TFS (Team Foundation Server)
5. TFS (Team Foundation Server) - I really wanted to like this one but I didn't. The integration into Visual Studio seems cumbersome, not as seemless as VSS or StarTeam & the bug tracking was horrible. As for the other features if I cannot get passed the bug tracking then cannot be seriously considered a SCM product. This is a version 1 Microsoft product, hopefully it will become more mature over the years. Our QA personnel at the time also despised the product, installing Visual Studio on a QA persons laptop seems backwards.

There are many other products out there, but I think I covered the main ones. I would be more than happy to review any others that are recommended.

Results
The winner here is Borland's StarTeam, it is a mature product has good integration into a wide variety of IDEs and is both a quality SCM & VCS. Whether you are a heads down coder, PM or QA guy you cannot go wrong here. I also want to give a plug to another great product from Borland, Togethersoft. It integrates into the major IDEs & provides object modeling, data modeling as well as code refactoring and generation. I cannot say enough about this product.

For basic VCS needs CVS, SVN or VSS all fit the bill and is better than nothing and cost nothing. Just make sure that you still have a backup plan regardless of which product you decide to deploy.