What are the best ways to archive and document software code changes?

In my projects, I have consistently relied on Git for version control. This practice has provided numerous benefits, such as enabling efficient tracking of changes, facilitating collaboration with team members, and allowing for easy rollback to previous versions when needed. Git has significantly improved my workflow, making it more organized and error-resistant.

In my experience, I have one of a similar stories I've been there once where I lost my archived and document software code changes and then I learned that these 4 ways help the most if you want to archive doc software code changes the right way 1. You can use automated documentation updates This makes sure that documentation stays current without manual efforts. 2. Develop interactive code tours using tools that allow team members to visually navigate through code changes. 3. Use visual mapping tools to showcase the evolution of code over time. 4. You can conduct regular workshops or knowledge-sharing sessions where team members discuss recent code changes.

By effectively archiving and documenting software code changes is crucial for maintaining a clear and organized development history. There are many great tools out there such as GitHub/Git/ Bitbucket/JIRA etc. - Use a version control system such as Git, Mercurial, or SVN to track and manage code changes. - Write clear and concise commit messages that describe the purpose and context of each change. - Implement a branching strategy (e.g., Git Flow) to organize and manage feature development, bug fixes, and releases. - Break changes into small, atomic commits that focus on a single logical unit of work. - Encourage the use of pull requests or merge requests for proposing and discussing changes.

I personally don't have any preference but have used some and found many efficient tools in terms of code reviews etc. & found them to be really efficient and highly productive. Some of them are listed below. - GitHub provides built-in code review features, including pull requests, inline comments, and collaborative discussions. It's widely used and integrates seamlessly with Git repositories. - Bitbucket, coupled with Jira, provides code hosting, collaboration, and code review features. It offers pull requests, inline commenting as well. - GitLab offers a comprehensive platform with built-in code review capabilities. It supports merge requests, inline commenting, and CI/CD integration within a single environment.

There are several options and very efficient tools such as: - For RESTful APIs, Swagger (now part of the OpenAPI Initiative) provides a way to document API endpoints, request/response formats, and authentication methods. - Javadoc is a tool for Java that generates API documentation from code comments. It is widely used in the Java development community. - Sphinx is a documentation tool commonly used for Python projects. - Doxygen is a widely used tool for generating documentation from source code. It supports multiple programming languages and produces HTML, PDF, or other formats. Folks have used Confluence as well to create, share, and collaborate on documentation. It integrates with Jira and Bitbucket. All of them are really good :-)

A few of code annotations we used in our projects: - For documenting RESTful APIs, Swagger allows you to use annotations in your code to describe API endpoints, request/response formats, and authentication methods. - In Java Spring applications, annotations like @Controller, @Service, and @Repository are used to provide metadata about the code. These annotations help in configuring and managing Spring components. - JSDoc is a markup language used to annotate JavaScript and TypeScript code. - In Python, docstrings are used as a form of code annotation. It really depends how much of changes, references, context, rationale etc. are required, pretty much all of them should do just fine.