[mdlug] Version control: tools and training

[Dave McMillan]

     This... is going to be rather off-topic, but this is the most 
likely group I know of to ask about this.

     I work for a Detroit-area industrial-automation company that's 
never really been a software development house, but now finds itself 
becoming one unexpectedly.  So I've been tasked with finding a way to 
bring us into the 21st century. :-\

     So, I have a small group of "developers" that are essentially 
self-taught, and have spent their careers doing mostly one-off software 
projects and managing their own versions and backups independently (if 
at all), often mostly inside their heads.  Plus a larger number of 
"debuggers" that have less programming skill, but get much more time on 
the active machines, who will be the people who do most of the 
bug-finding and reporting, and installing/testing updates and bugfixes 
pushed out by the developers.  And customers that want levels of 
traceability and documentation that, frankly, we've *never* done.

     Just to ice the cake, this being industrial automation means that a 
lot of our source code is tied up in proprietary languages that are 
recorded in proprietary binary formats and not generally accessible by 
3rd-party tools like (for example) git.  So I'm in the position of 
possibly being forced to maintain an entire *ecosystem* of different 
version-control systems with brand-specific branches for different 
pieces of equipment.

     And did I mention that while *some* software has to be 
centrally-controlled, other parts of the *same* software have to be 
field-editable on a machine-by-machine basis?  And I have to track *all* 
of that.

      So, right now, my biggest concern is less the *tools,* than the 
*training.*  Whatever tool (or tool set) we end up choosing (and there 
I'm at the mercy of the beancounters), I think my *bigger* problem is 
the total lack of any in-house *culture* for version control, 
multi-person developer/debug teams, and obsessive 
tracking/documentation/etc.  And I, frankly, am just as clueless. So, 
I'll put it to people who (hopefully) know more about this kind of thing 
than I do:  where do I *start*?  Are there training programs, or 
certification courses, or even just a *really good* O'Reilly book that I 
can use to get myself off square one?  And does anyone know of any sort 
of training curriculum for bringing this sort of cultural shift into an 
existing "herd of cats" development team?