Ability level of git hub amongst computer science students

Abstract

Source code management is one of the most vital tools in modern software development. Moreover, the open source initiative requires a method to distribute their code effectively. GitHub is one of the most popular web-based version control systems that offers version control and source code management. Therefore, it is important to introduce GitHub as early as possible to computer science students. Our objective is to observe the use of GitHub as a source code management system. We perform a survey targeted at the students and collected 298 answers. We also perform a short interview amongst the lecturer regarding their familiarity with GitHub and source control management in general. The survey result shows that while GitHub is quite popular amongst the student, the knowledge and experience of using it is considerably low. Similar responses were received from the lecturer that argues that the role of GitHub in classroom is redundant. The details of the result are thoroughly discussed in this paper.