So, you've heard about distributed software development and you'd like to learn more about it.

You've also heard that distributed is about tools such as Mercurial and GIT, but you're not into kernel development and not willing to go back to the command line days.

You're probably more interested on IDEs such us Visual Studio or Eclipse than hacking code with vi, aren't you?

Is distributed still for you?

Yes, it is.

What is distributed development about?

Here are some facts:

• Distributed software development is not only about hackers working on open source projects worldwide, and not only about huge corporations and offshore-outsourcing.

• Distributed is about making developers working together as seamlessly as possible, even if they're working on small teams.

What problems distributed development solves?

• What if you've a team at your city and a second team at another office some miles away?

• What if one of your developers wants to work at home, even if it's on a temporary basis?

• What if you need to go to the customer's site to put your system into production, make some adjustments or fix some bugs?

Yes, you could set up a VPN to solve all the problems above, but internet connections are not always reliable, not always doable and, unfortunately, not always fast enough.

What's the answer?: have your own SCM at your office/workstation/laptop and have your changes shared among computers.

How Plastic SCM helps?

Plastic SCM is fully distributed. Plastic is all about flexibility, so it can be set up as a standalone team server, or as an individual service running on your laptop, enabling you to continue making changes while disconnected.

The same is true to connect several offices together.

Why should you use Plastic SCM for distributed?

Easy: Plastic SCM makes distributed development simple.

Replication and synchronization is handled by a powerful and easy to use graphical user interface so you don't have to type arcane commands, or learn its internals in order to use it.

Going distributed with Plastic is as simple as checking in some code into your current version control system.

What other problems can Plastic SCM distributed solve?

Of course, there are other issues that distributed development helps solve:

• Setting up a failsafe network of servers
• Enabling teams from different companies work together on the same product, sharing part of their codebases
• Making teams cooperate even when, for security reasons, they don't have direct internet network connection.
  

Find some sample distributed usage scenarios here.