Constantly. Devlopment is a process, and artifacts fall out of it. The obvious artifact is the source code, but others include documentation, revision history,

Constantly. Devlopment is a process, and artifacts fall out of it. The obvious artifact is the source code, but others include documentation, revision history, tickets and infrastructure configuration. We should be taking as much care of these as we do source code. One example I don't think I've seen mentioned in this thread is that sometimes a change touches two widely-separated parts of the code. The commit message may be your only opportunity to comment both parts at the same time - to tie them together.