How Do Computer Science Students Use Distributed Version Control Systems?

Cochez, Michael; Isomöttönen, Ville; Tirronen, Ville; Itkonen, Jonne

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-03998-5_11

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…The reason is that creating a repository always involves a small amount of overhead which is not significant if the benefits of the system are clear. We also noticed in our earlier research that students who are working in a project course produce better commit messages as when they use Git for weekly course work [4] (in the present paper we analyzed the students' own view of the messages). We recommend teachers to pay attention to how to communicate course management use cases and more realistic VCS use cases to learners, and even to use another kinds of tools for pure submission returns.…”

Section: Absence Of Authentic Use Casesmentioning

confidence: 65%

“…-In our view, the most interesting aspect emerging from the data on commit message writing, constituting a future research question on the writing activity and informativeness, is that this writing may naturally become dependent on group size, communication distance, and the current complexity of the shared product development. The finding that students considered their presence in the work room removing a need for informative commit messages is likely to explain our previous observation of nonsensical commit messages [5], while this appears to be less prevailing in a project-based course as compared to exercise-based courses [4].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Version control systems have been used in various computing courses, while there is still a call for more empirical research on the student usage of the systems (see, e.g., [19]). We have previously studied students' use of Git by analyzing repositories with various metrics [5,4]. In the present paper, we continue this research by focusing on student and teacher (authors) experiences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git

Isomöttönen

Cochez

2014

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Self Cite

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Abstract. Scholars agree on the importance of incorporating use of version control systems (VCSs) into computing curricula, so as to be able to prepare students for today's distributed and collaborative work places. One of the present-day distributed version control systems (DVCSs) is Git, the system we have used on several courses. In this paper, we report on the challenges for learning and using the system based on a survey data collected from a project-based course and our own teaching experiences during several different kinds of computing courses. The results of this analysis are discussed and recommendations are made.

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Section: Absence Of Authentic Use Casesmentioning

confidence: 65%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git

Isomöttönen

Cochez

2014

Communications in Computer and Information Science

Self Cite

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“…The adoption of git in education [10][11][12][13][14] offers the opportunity to gain insights into the amount of work contributed to the project by each team member (e.g., source code added to the repository), as well as behavior patterns (e.g., software engineering practices and the team dynamics), through metrics visualizations. We believe that an assessment based on quantitative git metrics could serve as a helpful feedback tool (and fairer grading scheme) for both instructors and students, providing objective real-time measures of contributions to a development project.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using git metrics to measure students' and teams' code contributions in software development projects

Hamer

Quesada-López²,

Martinez³

et al. 2021

CLEIej

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Many software engineering courses are centered around team-based project development. Analyzing the source code contributions during the projects’ development could provide both instructors and students with constant feedback to identify common trends and behaviors that can be improved during the courses. Evaluating course projects is a challenge due to the difficulty of measuring individual student contributions versus team contributions during the development. The adoption of distributed version control sys-tems like git enable the measurement of students’ and teams’ contributions to the project.In this work, we analyze the contributions within eight software development projects,with 150 students in total, from undergraduate courses that used project-based learning.We generate visualizations of aggregated git metrics using inequality measures and the contribution per module, which offer insights into the practices and processes followed by students and teams throughout the project development. This approach allowed us to identify inequality among students’ contributions, the modules where students con-tributed, development processes with a non-steady pace, and integration practices render-ing a useful feedback tool for instructors and students during the project’s development.Further studies can be conducted to assess the quality, complexity, and ownership of the contributions by analyzing software artifacts.

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“…Version control software (VCS) has been used extensively in professional software engineering to manage changes to files (Cochez et al., 2013). In practice, these technologies enable multiple people to work together collaboratively whilst also permitting flexible change tracking, and the ability to revert to previous versions (Cochez et al., 2013; Sink, 2011). Centralised version control software retains the development repository on a central server, a popular example being Apache Subversion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Administrative social science data: The challenge of reproducible research

et al. 2016

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Powerful new social science data resources are emerging. One particularly important source is administrative data, which were originally collected for organisational purposes but often contain information that is suitable for social science research. In this paper we outline the concept of reproducible research in relation to micro-level administrative social science data. Our central claim is that a planned and organised workflow is essential for high quality research using microlevel administrative social science data. We argue that it is essential for researchers to share research code, because code sharing enables the elements of reproducible research. First, it enables results to be duplicated and therefore allows the accuracy and validity of analyses to be evaluated. Second, it facilitates further tests of the robustness of the original piece of research. Drawing on insights from computer science and other disciplines that have been engaged in e-Research we discuss and advocate the use of Git repositories to provide a useable and effective solution to research code sharing and rendering social science research using micro-level administrative data reproducible.

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How Do Computer Science Students Use Distributed Version Control Systems?

Cited by 6 publications

References 5 publications

Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git

Challenges and Confusions in Learning Version Control with Git

Using git metrics to measure students' and teams' code contributions in software development projects

Administrative social science data: The challenge of reproducible research

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