What's the best way to explain branching (of source code) to a client?

Posted by Jon Hopkins on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Jon Hopkins
Published on 2010-11-30T15:34:51Z Indexed on 2012/06/08 22:47 UTC
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version-control

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branching

The situation is that a client requested a number of changes about 9 months ago which they then put on hold with them half done. They've now requested more changes without having made up their mind to proceed with the first set of changes. The two sets of changes will require alterations to the same code modules.

I've been tasked with explaining why them not making a decision about the first set of changes (either finish them or bin them) may incur additional costs (essentially because the changes would need to be made to a branch then if they proceed with the first set of changes we'd have to merge them to the trunk - which will be messy - and retest them).

The question I have is this:

How best to explain branching of code to a non-technical client?

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