The first question people ask when they talk about version control is, What tool are you using? This is a practical question that reveals the important impact tools have on the way we work.
Although the tool influences how you work, it should not be the main concern. Of course, tools with a feature set that matches your needs make things work better. But the most important thing is to balance the capabilities of the tool with the needs of the organization and the developers. It is critical to make the processes easy so that people will follow them. Another aspect that this book shares with advocates of agile development is that it is the people on a team and what they do that is important, or as the Agile Manifesto says, “Individuals and interactions are more important than processes and tools.”
When you find that an everyday practice needs a large number of (hard to remember) manual steps, you may want to question the capabilities of the tool or the value of the practice.
Taken from: Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
