The Case for Watches

CVS allows multiple users to work on the same files simultaneously.

Conflicts, if any, are found and reported at commit time.

Works well and without many conflicts assuming that responsibility is clearly assigned for who is primarily responsible for what files or sections. (And also on projects where commits are infrequent.)

Problems can occur with a large project under very active development when there is the potential for several developers to modify the same section of code at the same time.

A way to minimize conflict is to use a feature of CVS called watches.