If in Doubt, Try Three: Developing Better Version Control Commit Behaviour with First Year Students
2022 (English)In: SIGCSE 2022 - Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2022, p. 362-368Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Developing good version control skills is important for students to master. This work focuses on helping students integrate good commit behaviour using a scaffolding process that happens with their regular assignments. A test group of students (n=30) was required to make a minimum of three commits in the first week. In the second week, students were trained to write better commit messages and worked together on a commit plan. In the final week, students worked alone on their commit plan. Commit behaviour was analysed for assignments occurring before, during and after the process. Results showed that students improved their commit behaviour in terms of number of commits, starting earlier with their assignments and writing more meaningful commit messages when compared to the rest of their cohort and the previous year's cohort (m=350). Qualitative results showed that students were mostly positive towards developing better commit behaviour and felt that the extra effort to think in commits delivered proportionally more benefits for their work.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) , 2022. p. 362-368
Keywords [en]
commit behaviour, cs1/cs2, git, version control systems, Information management, Scaffolds, Commit behavior, First year students, Previous year, Version control, Version control system, Students
National Category
Learning
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-321874DOI: 10.1145/3478431.3499371ISI: 000884263800053Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85126146076OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-321874DiVA, id: diva2:1713518
Conference
53rd Annual ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, SIGCSE 2022, 3-5 March 2022
Note
Part of proceedings: ISBN 978-1-4503-9070-5
QC 20221125
2022-11-252022-11-252022-12-15Bibliographically approved