software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

(and, by extension, in content-editing environments, especially

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

s, that make use of the software development process of

revision control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...

), reversion or reverting is the abandonment of one or more recent changes in favor of a return to a previous version of the material at hand (typically software source code in the context of application development; HTML, CSS or script code in the context of web development; or content and formatting thereof in the context of wikis). A revert may be done for a wide variety of reasons, including: fixing errors introduced by previous edits; restoring the material to a state that was not contentious until new disputes can be resolved; undoing

scope creep Scope creep (also called requirement creep, or kitchen sink syndrome) in project management refers to changes, continuous or uncontrolled growth in a project’s scope, at any point after the project begins. This can occur when the scope of a pr ...

;

regression testing Regression testing (rarely, ''non-regression testing'') is re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs as expected after a change. If not, that would be called a ''regres ...

; and even petty malice, vandalistic intent, or personal unhappiness with the author of a previous change. While the is generally agreed to be a sound and sometimes necessary one, particular instantiations of its use may be at least as controversial as the changes being reverted.

See also