This sounds pretty abstract, so I'd like to give an example of such a tool that might show up one day and prove its value lateron: software configuration management (SCM), using tools such as SCCS, RCS, CVS, SVN, git, you name it.
Hm, my mind boggles - in my book, SCM is a tad more than just a revision system, Software Configuration Management is more a tool for system administration, rather than software development. SCM also include automated building and testing of software (hudson, jenkins, codeship, cruisecontrol...), change control with peer reviewing before deployment (puppet, chef, cfengine ...) Of course, using such tools can also be usefull for developers too, and these days I dont know any coders who don't at least use a revision control system.