Bringing more development practices to the world of administration

In tradition software development and system administration tends to be separated. So useful practices in software development are not known by many administrators. I would say that the world of system administrations lack very much behind software development's world.
While using Version Control System (VCS) is obvious thing in any software project, not many administrator use this very useful tool during their daily work. The result is a dirty environment where a configuration's file is backup manually by renaming before making change. Also there is difficult to perform a rollback and reason and time of change is not well maintained.
Other often well encouraging software principles are to achieve re-usability, readability, explicitness as well as to avoid duplication. On the other hand an administrator cares much less about them. I have seen an environment where there are hundreds of scripts poorly written, repetitive, difficult to understand and maintained. I do thing that by using technique as re-factoring the situation can be improved significally.