Git as a support to assess students' contribution in teamwork

Abstract

Teamwork is one of the ways to develop the transversal competencies expected in industry, especially in the field of Information Technology. However, the success of teamwork during programming courses depends on the choice of tools that facilitates collaborative work, organization and conflict management. Objectively evaluating both the individual and the collaborative work must be a great part of this choice. Among these tools, we propose to retain the version control system Git. Indeed, Git facilitates teamwork evaluation by giving access to information recorded in its history. It then becomes necessary to define the criteria to be applied to make an analysis and a judgment. We propose in this article an inventory of the potential evaluation criteria and identify the most relevant ones in terms of evaluation of the regularity and quantitative contribution considering the biases that they induce. Moreover, one of the difficulties that teachers may encounter when producing an assessment is not only to evaluate contributions, but also to be able to monitor them regularly, especially when teams are numerous. We then recommend a support tool based on the criteria we identified, offering a general overview and facilitating access to details. Its evaluation as part of a course allowed us to analyze different team profiles as well as the limits to the use of such a tool to make a judgment.