Do Developers Really Know How to Use Git Commands? A Large-scale Study Using Stack Overflow

Abstract

Git, a cross-platform and open source distributed version control tool, provides strong support for non-linear development and is capable of handling everything from small to large projects with speed and efficiency. It has become an indispensable tool for millions of software developers and is the de facto standard of version control in software development nowadays. However, despite its widespread use, developers still frequently face difficulties when using various Git commands to manage projects and collaborate. To better help developers use Git, it is necessary to understand the issues and difficulties that they may encounter when using Git. Unfortunately, this problem has not yet been comprehensively studied. To fill this knowledge gap, in this article, we conduct a large-scale study on Stack Overflow, a popular Q&A forum for developers. We extracted and analyzed 80,370 relevant questions from Stack Overflow, and reported the increasing popularity of the Git command questions. By analyzing the questions, we identified the Git commands that are frequently asked and those that are associated with difficult questions on Stack Overflow to help understand the difficulties developers may encounter when using Git commands. In addition, we conducted a survey to understand how developers learn Git commands in practice, showing that self-learning is the primary learning approach. These findings provide a range of actionable implications for researchers, educators, and developers.