Think of it as “Track Changes” for a whole product
Imagine several people editing an important document. You want to know who changed what, compare versions, and restore yesterday’s copy when something goes wrong. Version control does that for code and other project files.
Git is a widely used version control tool. It runs on each developer’s computer, where they can track changes locally. Other version control systems exist, but Git is common across software teams.
A developer can clone a repository to get a local copy. They save checkpoints called commits, each recording changes and a message explaining them. They then push those commits to a shared repository on a Git hosting provider. Sharing code there does not update the live product; deployment is a separate step.
Why your team cares
Version control lets developers experiment, review one another’s work, and trace a bug to a change. During a production incident, the history can help them identify a known working version to restore. Reverting code alone may not undo data changes or immediately change what is running in production.