Usage of Revision Control Tools in Capstone Senior Design Courses

The capstone project serves as the culminating experience of most engineering programs. Collaborative design and documentation tools are an integral component of a modern product design and development environment. The Engineering Design Guide and Environment (EDGE), is a web-based system which provides engineers with tools for collaboration on multidisciplinary projects. The EDGE system includes version-controlled repositories for project documentation and design files. By examining the history of changes to these repositories, it is possible to view the usage trends of the system and their relationship to curriculum structure. This paper explores these usage trends with respect to the transition from a quarter-based to a semester-based calendar, the cycle of project deliverables within an academic term, and the transition from a one-day-per-week meeting pattern to a two-day-per-week meeting pattern.