I recently started working with a new team doing detailed energy modeling for all flavors of building projects -- commercial, industrial, residential, new construction, renovations, additions. As the team has been growing, we've been discussing three particular problems that I believe version control could help with.
Our challenges
- Coordinating multiple people working on a single energy model. Each building model involves different components -- geometry, envelope, HVAC, lighting, etc. For time-crunched projects different people may work on different components simultaneously. To bring each person's work together at the end can be complicated and time-consuming.
- Keeping track of "known good versions" for a particular application. To streamline our work we create templates for various building components. Each template may only be ready to use for certain building types (say,
HVAC template #n
is working for commercial buildings but not tested for residential). When starting a new model we review release notes to make sure we apply the appropriate template, until our periodic review when we test/update templates for all use-cases. Both the tracking of historic versions, and the periodic integration of updates, is complicated and time-consuming. - Reproducing results from a report sent to a client. During model development we periodically prepare reports for clients. Each report is tied to a version of the model and templates which is archived on our server. This way we can re-open the old model to address any questions the client has, even as model development has continued. At times we also need to change aspects of the old model to answer specific client questions, before a model update is ready. At this point, the task of integrating two separate streams of model changes becomes... complicated and time consuming.
All of these processes can be improved with version control -- but nobody here has ever used version control!
I'm wondering if others here have been in a similar position, and implemented a version control system. What did you use, and how did it go? What best practices can you share?
Some details about our team and our work
- All engineers use Windows 10
- All of our modeling tools are Win32 applications (eQuest, Open Studio, TRNSYS), but modeling source files are stored as text-based files (not binary)
- We're considering Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar
- We do not currently have a server where we could run something like SVN, so we'd prefer a distributed system which could store files on a shared drive (such as a networked drive, SharePoint, DropBox, etc).