The summer months are a strange time in the technology business. Executives and project people take vacation time. It creates an anxious, lazy experience where work stops while people wait for instructions from people in authority. The profession floods with recent graduates eager to impress and begin their careers. I am always impressed by the desire of these new graduates to do good work and make a difference. Unfortunately, I do not think that colleges, engineering programs, and boot camps are doing a good job preparing these individuals for the work world. Today on the blog, getting entry-level developers to understand source control.
During a daily scrum meeting, I welcomed some new developers to the team. The scrum master scheduled a knowledge transfer session. The team also created stories so the new developers could pair program with the more experienced engineers. It shows a level of maturity on the team to which most agile coaches aspire. In that moment of supreme confidence, I made a hasty assumption. I asked if all the developers were comfortable with the source control system. The scrum master pulled me aside and said that none of the new engineers had source control experience and that the senior team members would have to teach them the basics. After the shock wore off, I thanked the scrum master and pondered how it was possible to have newly minted computer programmers and engineers who do not know how to use source control.
Reflecting on my education and subsequent technology journey, it occurred to me we train people to work as individuals rather than on teams. The reason developers out of college do not understand source control because their training does not require it. Assignments are small and self-contained, where a student learns to master particular skills like looping code, decision trees, or variable arrays. Instructs have hundreds of students to grade, and plagiarism is rampant as numerous code examples exist online. Checking code into and out of source control is unnecessary in an academic setting. When those students graduate, they enter the world of enterprise systems and interdependent code. Source control becomes a necessary survival tool in your career.
A good understanding of source control should be mandatory if you graduate with a computer science degree. Universities and colleges should set up source control repositories using open source systems like .git. Students check out repositories for assignments and check them back in. A teaching assistant can act like a senior developer doing code reviews, and then grades can be based on how easily the instructor can check out code and run it. More advanced classes can attempt to work on mutual systems and learn how to avoid overwriting each other's work.
This approach comes with a few bits of overhead. Address security concerns need to, so students don't deliberately sabotage each other's work. The numerous branches in the student repositories will need maintenance at the end of each semester. Finally, instructors will have to manage their course work like an open-source project. More graduates would understand the importance and necessity of source control if these factors were accounted for, making them more employable.
As a coach and scrum master, I want a rookie developer to succeed and avoid the mishaps I experienced in this profession. To be a success, all developers need to understand source control.
Until next time.
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