As I've been working on more development tasks, I regularly hear from developers that a version control system (VCS) is the "true" version of our code. We should always look to a VCS for the actual code that we need to work with. I believe that, and I think it's true.

However I heard a DBA say that the true version of the code is always in production. That's what's being executed, especially in the database world. There is some truth here as well, but in my mind this speaks to a broken process. This means we have a more chaotic, and less "engineered" way of producing our software. Perhaps more importantly, we don't have a good source from which development can proceeed.

Certainly hot fixes need to occur, and there are times that you can't wait for a set of changes to be made in development, tested, approved, and then deployed to production. I think you can overcome most of this, but there may always be cases where this happens, so I don't think we should  argue about how fast a software deployment pipeline we can build.

Instead I'd say that production changes should always be fed back to the VCS. Our code is an ever changing set of files that we can only really keep track of by using a proper VCS. We should be able to track back the view of production at any point in time to a set of versions for our files in a VCS.

Certainly some of you have gotten by for years, perhaps your entire career, without a VCS. However I'd argue that isn't a good position for your organization. What habits and skills you have could easily be lost if you leave, and your memory isn't a point of record. A stable system, a VCS, should note the state of our systems, both in development and production.

And if you're worried about the cost of a VCS, there are plenty of free (as in beer) ones. I recommend Git, but there are plenty to choose from. In terms of overhead, certainly you can use tools like SQL Source Control or ReadyRoll, but even without those tools, using a VCS really just requires building some habits. If you aren't willing to change your workflow slightly, there's probably no way you will ever ensure your environment is under control in the long run. However, if you do change to a VCS, I think you'll find it's well worth the effort.