Thanks to everyone that completed our Repository Shootout Survey. We had over 180 respondents. That's a great turnout.

After sifting through the survey results, many interesting facts and statistics emerged.  However, three stood out above the rest.

1. GIT was the Big Winner and Mercuriual was the Up-and-Comer 
   To borrow a page from Geoffrey Moore's playbook, GIT has definitely "crossed the chasm". Forty one percent of all respondents use GIT professionally at work with subversion being a close second at 38%.  I suppose that this is not surprising given that almost half of all respondents work in companies where only 1-10 people use an SCM system.  However, larger development teams are also leaning toward GIT and SVN.  Almost 1/3 of respondents work at companies where 50+ people use an SCM system and the majority of them use either GIT or SVN as well.
   
   Now, we also asked which SCM systems our respondents would use if the choice were completely up to them.  There were only two SCM systems that a significant percentage of people would like to change to - GIT and Mercurial.  Over 50% more people would use GIT if given the choice (113 vs 75) and almost double the number of people would use Mercurial if given the choice (17 vs 9).

1. Branching/Merging, Ease of Use and Security win the Features Race  "Support for branching" and "Support complex merges" were the most important features amongst our respondents with 90% and 78% respectively ranking them as "Important" or "Can't Live Without It".  This speaks to the fact that more and more people isolate sections of their codebase and only merge it back into the Master once they are certain that is is rock solid. Ease of Use and Security were also important to respondents with over 70% ranking them as "Important" or "Can't Live without It".
   
   So, who were the losers in the features race?  Slightly more people ranked a "Windows Interface" and a "Centralized Version Control System" as not important (the bottom two ratings vs the top two ratings).  And, virtually no one thought that "Subtree Permissions" was an important feature. 

1. Hosted SCM Solutions Win on Ease of Use and Reliability    
   Because Assembla is a hosted SCM solution, we were curious to see what the market views as the relative strengths and weaknesses of hosted SCM solutions versus installed SCM solutions.  It was heartening to find that respondents believe that hosted solutions are more reliable and easier to use. 
   
   But, we also learned where we either need to work harder or market our existing features better as respondents felt that installed SCM solutions handled permissioning and continuous integration better.     

Thanks again to everyone that participated.  We hope to do more of these surveys in the future.