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The better developers can learn software tools, the faster they can startusing them and the more efficiently they can later work with them. Tutorialsare supposed to help here. While in the early days of computing, mostly texttutorials were available, nowadays software developers can choose among a hugenumber of tutorials for almost any popular software tool. However, only littleresearch was conducted to understand how text tutorials differ from othertutorials, which tutorial types are preferred and, especially, which tutorialtypes yield the best learning experience in terms of efficiency andeffectiveness, especially for programmers. To evaluate these questions, weconverted an existing video tutorial for a novel software tool into acontent-equivalent text tutorial. We then conducted an experiment in threegroups where 42 undergraduate students from a software engineering course werecommissioned to operate the software tool after using a tutorial: the firstgroup was provided only with the video tutorial, the second group only with thetext tutorial and the third group with both. In this context, the differencesin terms of efficiency were almost negligible: We could observe thatparticipants using only the text tutorial completed the tutorial faster thanthe participants with the video tutorial. However, the participants using onlythe video tutorial applied the learned content faster, achieving roughly thesame bottom line performance. We also found that if both tutorial types areoffered, participants prefer video tutorials for learning new content but texttutorials for looking up "missed" information. We mainly gathered our datathrough questionnaires and screen recordings and analyzed it with suitablestatistical hypotheses tests. The data is available at [12]. Since producingtutorials requires effort, knowing with which type of tutorial learnability canbe increased to which extent has an immense practical relevance. We concludethat in contexts similar to ours, while it would be ideal if software toolmakers would offer both tutorial types, it seems more efficient to produce onlytext tutorials instead of a passive video tutorial - provided you manage tomotivate your learners to use them.

What Is the Best Way For Developers to Learn New Software Tools? An Empirical Comparison Between a Text and a Video Tutorial