The Disappearance of J. T. Womblegast — A Git Tutorial

Every sufficiently technical person in a software project will work with Git repositories, including testers. Git has its intricacies, though: Branches, merging and finding specific information about a given change can be daunting.

This Git tutorial is wrapped in J. T. Womblegast’s disappearance story. We don’t know who this person was, what they did or what happened to them. We know this: J. T. Womblegast is gone. But why?

This is the mystery we will investigate during the tutorial. Even more mysterious is the only evidence J.T. left behind: a Git repository. It contains the relevant information to solve the puzzle of the disappearance. Unfortunately, it also has much noise and data irrelevant to the investigation. The task is to isolate the relevant parts, combine the facts and conclude why J.T. is gone.

Participants will learn about Git and how to use it on the command line. First, participants will download the whole repository on their local computer. Then, we will find answers to these questions:

1. What changes have been made, and how can I display the details of a particular change?
2. What are branches and tags? What are they used for?
3. How can I find specific information?
4. What change caused a particular test failure?
5. Why and when has a specific file been deleted?

The first and short part of the tutorial covers the technical terms used when working with Git. The second part is much longer. You will learn various ways to work with a Git repository. In exercises, this knowledge is immediately applied to investigate Womblegast’s vanishing.

At the end of the tutorial, you should have a good idea about how to work with Git repositories. You will also get a handout explaining the Git commands and search techniques presented in the session. Last but not least, we will have figured out why and when Womblegast left.