Git is celebrating its 10-year anniversary. The distributed version control system, created by Linus Torvalds, debuted in April 2005, and since then it has been providing teams of all sizes with easier code reviews, flexible workflows and cost-effective local branching, according to Eric Wittman, general manager of developer tools at Atlassian.

“Git provides a lot of flexibility for software teams to choose how they want to collaborate on code with many workflows that support any process a team would like to follow,” he said. “Through our own experiences with large and distributed engineering teams, we have not only seen Git improve the collaboration among our teams, but enables them to ship higher-quality code at a faster rate.”

Through the years Git has evolved to become self-hosted, provide multiple branch merges, improve performance, and inspire projects such as GitHub, SourceTree and GitLab. According to Wittman, the most notable change over the last 10 years is the addition of pull requests on top of Git.

“[It] has completely changed how developers collaborate and contribute code to software,” he said. “Pull requests opened the door for multiple branching models and some of the best practices that have emerged around branch-based workflows.”

Atlassian even added Git to its own source-control-management system in 2011.

“Bitbucket is powered by Git and includes the same base features,” said Wittman. “On top of the core Git features, Bitbucket includes features designed to improve the workflows of professional software teams.”

Over the span of 10 years, Git has become one of the most popular source-control-management systems for developers, and its exponential growth will continue in 2015 and on, according to Wittman.

“Today Git is the most popular SCM for developers, but we are just scratching the surface of adoption among large organizations,” he said. “Thirty-three percent of respondents to a 2014 survey by Forrester Consulting indicated that 60% or more of their code is currently stored and managed by Git-based systems, and by 2018, 54% anticipate using Git for 60% or more.”

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