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Developing scientific software in publicly accessible repositories enables early involvement of users, helps build collaborations, contributes to the reproducibility of results generated by the software, facilitates software reusability, and contributes to improving software quality. Taken together, this ensures that your software has the best chance of being used by as many people as possible while promoting transparency.
Using a version control system allows you to easily track changes in your software, both your own changes as well as those made by collaborators. There are many flavors of version control systems, ranging from older systems such as CVS and Subversion to more modern ones such as Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar. By configuring your version control system to use GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, you’ll even have backups of every version of the software you ever made. Additionally, those platforms offer collaboration tools such as an issue tracker and project management tools, and you’ll be able to use third-party services such as code quality checkers, correctness checkers, and a lot more.
Git is the most feature-rich, most modern and most popular by a good margin, and we heartily recommend you use it for all you version control needs. To get the best out of Git, use it in combination with GitHub.com, Bitbucket.org, or GitLab.com.