High-level Best Practices in SCM

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When deploying new SCM (software configuration management) tools, implementers sometimes focus on perfecting fine-grained activities, while unwittingly carrying forward poor, large-scale practices from their previous jobs or previous tools. The result is a well-executed blunder. This paper promotes some high-level best practices that reflect the authors' experiences in deploying SCM. 
 

Workspaces, where developers build, test, and debug.	Don't share workspaces. Don't work outside of managed workspaces. Don't use jello views. Stay in sync with the codeline. Check in often.
Codelines, the canonical sets of source files.	Give each codeline a policy. Give each codeline an owner. Have a mainline.
Branches, variants of the codeline.	Branch only when necessary. Don't copy when you mean to branch. Branch on incompatible policy. Branch late. Branch, instead of freeze.
Change propagation, getting changes from one codeline to another.	Make original changes in the branch that has evolved the least since branching. Propagate early and often. Get the right person to do the merge.
Builds, turning source files into products.	Source + tools = product. Check in all original source. Segregate built objects from original source. Use common build tools. Build often. Keep build logs and build output.
Process, the rules for all of the above.	Track change packages. Track change package propagations. Distinguish change requests from change packages. Give everything an owner. Use living documents.