What Makes a Good Commit Message?

Yingchen Tian, Yuxia Zhang, Klaas Jan Stol, Lin Jiang, Hui Liu*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

28 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A key issue in collaborative software development is communication among developers. One modality of communication is a commit message, in which developers describe the changes they make in a repository. As such, commit messages serve as an 'audit trail' by which developers can understand how the source code of a project has changed-and why. Hence, the quality of commit messages affects the effectiveness of communication among developers. Commit messages are often of poor quality as developers lack time and motivation to craft a good message. Several automatic approaches have been proposed to generate commit messages. However, these are based on uncurated datasets including considerable proportions of poorly phrased commit messages. In this multi-method study, we first define what constitutes a 'good' commit message, and then establish what proportion of commit messages lack information using a sample of almost 1,600 messages from five highly active open source projects. We find that an average of circa 44% of messages could be improved, suggesting the use of uncurated datasets may be a major threat when commit message generators are trained with such data. We also observe that prior work has not considered semantics of commit messages, and there is surprisingly little guidance available for writing good commit messages. To that end, we develop a taxonomy based on recurring patterns in commit messages' expressions. Finally, we investigate whether 'good' commit messages can be automatically identified; such automation could prompt developers to write better commit messages.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2022
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages2389-2401
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781450392211
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Event44th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2022 - Pittsburgh, United States
Duration: 22 May 202227 May 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
Volume2022-May
ISSN (Print)0270-5257

Conference

Conference44th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPittsburgh
Period22/05/2227/05/22

Keywords

  • Commit-based software development
  • commit message quality
  • open collaboration

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