Subject Overview

A practical introduction to distributed version control with Git, covering repository concepts, everyday commands, collaboration, branching, release workflows, governance, security, DevOps integration, analytics, and emerging AI-assisted practices.

Learning Goal

Students will be able to create and manage Git repositories, maintain reliable history, collaborate through modern hosting platforms, resolve conflicts, recover changes, apply secure team workflows, support CI/CD, and make informed version-control decisions.

Syllabus

1. Version Control Foundations

Learning Objective: Explain version control, snapshots, repositories, revisions, traceability, centralized versus distributed models, and Git’s role in software development and digital transformation.

Category: foundation

2. Git Architecture and Terminology

Learning Objective: Understand working trees, staging areas, local and remote repositories, commits, hashes, objects, references, HEAD, branches, tags, and Git’s directed acyclic graph model.

Category: foundation

3. Git Installation, Configuration, and Tools

Learning Objective: Install Git; configure identity, editors, defaults, aliases, line endings, credentials, SSH keys, and ignore rules; and use command-line, IDE, and graphical interfaces.

Category: foundation

4. The Essential Git Workflow

Learning Objective: Initialize or clone repositories; inspect status; stage, commit, modify, rename, and remove files; write effective commit messages; and synchronize basic changes.

Category: core

5. History Inspection and Change Analysis

Learning Objective: Use logs, diffs, blame, show, search, and comparison tools to understand repository history, investigate changes, support audits, and make evidence-based decisions.

Category: core

6. Branching, Merging, and Integration

Learning Objective: Create and manage branches, merge development lines, understand fast-forward and three-way merges, use rebase appropriately, and maintain understandable history.

Category: core

7. Remote Repositories and Team Collaboration

Learning Objective: Work with remotes, fetch, pull, push, tracking branches, forks, upstream repositories, and access permissions across platforms such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.

Category: core

8. Conflict Resolution and Collaborative Quality

Learning Objective: Identify, resolve, test, and document merge and rebase conflicts; apply pull or merge requests, peer review, approval rules, and constructive collaboration practices.

Category: application

9. Undoing Changes and Repository Recovery

Learning Objective: Safely use restore, reset, revert, amend, reflog, stash, and cherry-pick; distinguish history-preserving from history-rewriting operations; and recover common mistakes.

Category: core

10. Team Workflows and Repository Strategy

Learning Objective: Compare feature branching, Gitflow, trunk-based development, release branches, and forking workflows; select approaches based on team size, delivery frequency, risk, and compliance needs.

Category: strategic

11. Releases, Tags, and Repository Scaling

Learning Objective: Apply annotated tags, semantic versioning, release notes, changelogs, Git LFS, submodules, and monorepository or multirepository decisions to support maintainable delivery.

Category: application

12. Git in DevOps and CI/CD

Learning Objective: Connect Git events to automated build, test, security, deployment, infrastructure-as-code, and GitOps processes while understanding pipelines, environments, and rollback practices.

Category: application

13. Security, Ethics, and Governance

Learning Objective: Protect credentials and sensitive data; use least privilege, protected branches, signed commits, secret scanning, dependency controls, retention policies, audit trails, and responsible authorship practices.

Category: strategic

14. Repository Analytics and Contemporary Practice

Learning Objective: Interpret contribution, review, lead-time, defect, and DORA-related indicators without misusing individual metrics; evaluate automation, AI-assisted commits and reviews, supply-chain security, and emerging version-control trends.

Category: contemporary