Collaborative Development and Deployment
The Salesforce B2C Commerce architecture lets you create multiple Sandbox instances where individual developers can work on discrete portions of an application, making efficient use of resources. At release time, developers file their changes back into a source control system for consolidation and testing.
Eclipse comes with a built-in client for the Concurrent Versions System (CVS). You can also use another system, such as Subversion (SVN) for your code repository. Many code repository/version control systems use a branch model to support multiple courses of work that are somewhat isolated from each other, yet still highly interdependent. This model lets individuals work on a team project, share their work with others as changes are made, and access the work of others as the project evolves. As team members produce new work, they share their work by committing their changes to the branch. Similarly, when they want to get the latest available work, they update their local workspaces to the changes on the branch. Thus the branch is constantly changing, moving forward as team members submit new work.
As a B2C Commerce development team member, it is important that you implement both a code repository/version control system and a versioning plan that follows a standard process. This process includes deploying/replicating code from the developer's sandbox instance to various other instances for integration and testing, and final deployment to Production.