What's wrong with git?: a conceptual design
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onward009-perez_de_rosso.pdf
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242.08 KB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Perez De Rosso, Santiago Nicolas
Jackson, Daniel
Date Issued
October 2013
Journal
Onward! Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming & software - Onward! '13
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Perez De Rosso, Santiago, and Daniel Jackson. “What’s Wrong with Git?: A Conceptual Design Analysis.” ACM Press, 2013. 37–52.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
It is commonly asserted that the success of a software development project, and the usability of the final product, depend on the quality of the concepts that underlie its design. Yet this hypothesis has not been systematically explored by researchers, and conceptual design has not played the central role in the research and teaching of software engineering that one might expect. As part of a new research project to explore conceptual design, we are engaging in a series of case studies. This paper reports on the early stages of our first study, on the Git version control system. Despite its widespread adoption, Git puzzles even experienced developers and is not regarded as easy to use. In an attempt to understand the root causes of its complexity, we analyze its conceptual model and identify some undesirable properties; we then propose a reworking of the conceptual model that forms the basis of (the first version of) Gitless, an ongoing effort to redesign Git and experiment with the effects of conceptual simplifications.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2509578.2509584
