Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT
Git, as the leading version-control system, is frequently employed by software developers, digital product managers, and knowledge workers. Information systems (IS) students aspiring to fill software engineering, management, or research positions would therefore benefit from familiarity with Git. However, teaching Git effectively can be challenging, as students in IS and other disciplines report themselves overwhelmed by the plethora of Git's detailed commands and options, including those involved in local setup and secure shell (SSH) connections. From our view, such technical considerations distract students, and even prevent them from developing a deeper understanding of the Git model and its underlying concepts. Ideally, teaching efforts should convey a solid understanding of the Git model and thereby enable students to ask the right questions and look up the relevant commands. With this teaching tip, we therefore challenge the common approach to organizing Git teaching materials. In particular, we draw on established pedagogical theory to propose a novel approach that employs a new, macro-level ordering of contents beginning with the concept of branches and then proceeding to committing and collaboration. We present several practical strategies that make this approach feasible. In addition, we recommend that teachers clearly separate conceptual from applied learning and present the more challenging transfer questions at the end of the course. Our hope is to stimulate reflection on the most effective ways to teach Git to future professionals.
Keywords: Git, Collaborative versioning, Distributed version control, Open source, Software engineering, Information systems as)
1. INTRODUCTION
With a dominant market share, Git is the leading version control system in use today (Dohmke, 2023). The distributed and efficient model of Git makes it particularly useful for teams that are not co-located but contribute to the same code-base in an asynchronous manner. Originating from the open-source community, the system has seen rapid adoption in the private sector, with thousands of freelancers, startups, and large tech companies using it. GitHub has turned into the largest hosting platform for Git repositories, allowing developers to manage, store, and share software being worked on concurrently. In 2018, when Microsoft and Google competed to acquire it, GitHub had approximately 83 million active accounts and 200 million repositories. Following Microsoft's acquisition for $7.5 billion, GitHub established itself as the dominant developer platform (Microsoft...