Can you Change the World with only 3 Commits? : Monitoring the Commit Behaviour of First Year Computer Science Students

Abstract: Having the skill to work with Version Control Systems (VCS) is an important aspect of most software development projects in the industry. But students may lack the knowledge on how to use it. By applying requirements on first year students of the Computer Science programme at KTH, this thesis aims to examine if that is enough to improve their VCS behaviour. This can be examined by applying requirements and then examining the metadata from GitHub. The results from this thesis show that the students committed a bit more when requirements were applied, but that the best way to get the students to commit more is to give them the knowledge on how to have a good commit behaviour. This is in line with previous research in the same area.