Measuring students' contributions in software development projects using Git metrics

Abstract

Many courses in the software engineering area are centered around team-based project development. Evaluating these projects is a challenge due to the difficulty of measuring individual student contributions versus team contributions. The adoption of distributed version control systems like Git enables the measurement of students’ and teams’ contributions to the project. In this work, we analyze the contributions within five software development projects from undergraduate courses that used project-based learning. For this, we generate visualizations of aggregated Git metrics using inequality indexes and inter-decile ratios, which offer insights into the practices and processes followed by students and teams throughout the project development. This approach allowed us to identify both inequality among students’ contributions and development processes with a non-steady pace, rendering a useful feedback tool for instructors and students during the development of the project. Further studies can be conducted to assess the complexity and value of students’ contributions by analyzing their source code commits and other software artifacts.