I have been playing around with org-babel's ability to do literate programming. It allows you control which file the code is tangled to, along with a comments

I have been playing around with org-babel's ability to do literate programming. It allows you control which file the code is tangled to, along with a comments which deliminate where in the literate source code a block of text came from. That gives some primitive ability to debug and build larger project bases. Unfortunately I have never managed to convince a team to adopt emacs, let alone org-mode, as the coding tool for a project. That's left me using the obviously broken, half finished and barely documented implementation as good enough for the parts of projects that are under my direct control. Even in that state however, when you throw in git and pandoc, it is vastly superior to any other devops system.