Bazaar is a tool to help people work on software.

For one person, it makes it easy to maintain different lines of development. Say, for example, a stable version that gets only bugfixes, and a devel version with lots of changes that will, eventually, become the next stable version.

For a group of people, it allows each person to maintain one or more lines of development, which they can then combine with other peoples work.

Although Bazaars major focus is software development, it can be used for other kinds of projects, as well. It works best with textual files, like source code, marked-up text (e.g. HTML), and plaintext. It is less effective with tree-structured data (e.g. XML), and is most limited in dealing with opaque binary files (e.g. Microsoft Word documents).