A Behavioral Approach to Understanding the Git Experience

Abstract

The Investigating and Archiving the Scholarly Git Experience (IASGE) project is multi-track study focused on understanding the uses of Git by students, faculty, and staff working in academic research institutions as well as the ways source code repositories and their associated contextual ephemera can be better preserved. This research, in turn, has implications regarding how to support Git in the scholarly process, how version control systems contribute to reproducibility, and how Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals can support Git through instruction and sustainability efforts. In this paper, we focus on a subset of our larger project and take a deep look at what code hosting platforms offer researchers in terms of productivity and collaboration. For this portion, a survey, focus groups, and user experience interviews were conducted to gain an understanding of how and why scholarly researchers use Version Control Systems (VCS) as well as some of the pain points in learning and using VCS for daily work.