What do software developers need from a file compare program? Why do they need to use it? The answers are simple, but it's really hard to do the right choice.

First, let's divide software developers into these who work with code and these who manage the process. Both roles are related to the editing code and there are two different viewpoints.

When software coder need to compare code to find out where the bug is, the manager need to know what changes were made and how can these changes affect the project.

If talking about viewpoints, then for sure, there are some other, for instance, someone need to control the quality of the software on various stages. Some one need to check the code and control if modifications that were made correspond with the applied standards. Other people might be involved in black box testing, getting only the results of program work and comparing them with the expected results.

Every role and viewpoint has it's own requirements and recommendations, let's focus on some key ideas.

All people involved in comparing source code will be fore sure interested in source code highlighting, it's good when the actual code can be seen exactly as it is represented in the development system.

The task of debugging software might involve the process of analyzing the binary version of the compiled source code, so having an ability to compare files represented as a binary files is also must have.

Quality assurance is very important, but the most important thing about quality assurance is automation. People are willing to automate quality assurance and the compare tool they use to compare expected values against real values must have a reporting ability. So that passing two file as a parameter would generated a resulted report which can be also analyzed automatically.

Some minor features that one should pay attention to. The compare program should be able to compare not just files, but whole folders. This is very useful when it's needed to compare two project versions or to synchronize changes.

Three-way compare, well, it's a good function, if you need to analyzed tree documents simultaneously, but if you need to compare more you will still miss some functions.

Finally, it would be great, if compare tool you use allows to merge two documents, e.g. approve or decline changes that programmer made.

Keep it simple with compare software, automate quality assurance with compare software. So now it's clear what features should software developer or software developer group look for. If we miss something else? Actually yes, compare tool should be able to integrate with development environment, this might be a CVS system or something else, often this one minor feature will save hours yearly, just by keeping you one click away a powerful compare program.

It sounds like an easy choice, but the price of compare tools vary a lot from freeware tools that, unfortunately, are not supported in a timely way to the hundred dollars utility packs. For software developer is choice must be somewhere around 50-70$ tool.

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