VeCVL: A Visual Language for Version Control

Abstract

Version control systems (VCS), such as Subversion and Git, are pervasive in industry; they are invaluable tools for collaborative development that allow software engineers to track changes, monitor issues, merge work from multiple people, and manage releases. These tools are most effective when they are a part of a developer's habitual workflow. Unfortunately, the use of these powerful tools is often taught much later in a developer's educational career than other tools like programming languages or databases. Even an experienced student's first experience with version control can be unpleasant. In this paper, the authors analyze the workflow of two common Version Control Systems with different version controls (Subversion and Git) to build a common visual language for these systems (Version Control Visual Language, or VeCVL), and show that the same visual language applies to other version control systems.

Scaffolding Version Control into the Computer Science Curriculum

“…On a 6-point Likert scale, students most commonly agreed or strongly agreed with statements such as the process was easy to use. For scoring, the following values were used 1 .…”

“…The power and flexibility of new distributed VCS can make them especially challenging, unfriendly, and distracting for students already fully engaged in developing core competencies required in the computer science curriculum. This paper, in conjunction with concurrent research [1], is an investigation into better approaches to introduce version control into pedagogy. For novice, less experienced students, we propose introducing these powerful version control tools by providing facilitative scaffolding in the form of a simple, consistent, visual language, that supports students during their introduction and initial exposure to VCS.…”

Gitsubmit and VeCVL: Integrating Version Control in Introductory Computer Science Education

“…Gitsubmit was developed in concert with VeCVL [4] as a method of introducing version control in education through scaffolding [1], and can be seen as the initial implementation of the visual language, expanded to be a full GUI instead of an icon set. VeCVL is a visual representation of the general steps present in version control system in a way that conveys direction of the changes' movement.…”

“…VeCVL is a visual representation of the general steps present in version control system in a way that conveys direction of the changes' movement. Section 3 contains an examination of Gitsubmit and its close ties to VeCVL, as well as a discussion of the deviations from the icon set introduced in [4] to adapt the visual language to a full GUI.…”

“…This paper examines an implementation of a submission system built around the Git version control system that simplifies the process of interacting with version control to only the important steps in a simple workflow (clone, add, commit, push). The interface developed for students implements the Version Control Visual Language (VeCVL) [4]. Additionally, there are tools for teachers and graders to manage assignments and grade submissions.…”