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Related papers: What Makes a Good Commit Message?

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Committing to a version control system means submitting a software change to the system. Each commit can have a message to describe the submission. Several approaches have been proposed to automatically generate the content of such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-03-29 Siyuan Jiang , Collin McMillan

We present ComSum, a data set of 7 million commit messages for text summarization. When documenting commits, software code changes, both a message and its summary are posted. We gather and filter those to curate developers' work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-25 Leshem Choshen , Idan Amit

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Eman Abdullah AlOmar , Jiaqian Liu , Kenneth Addo , Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer , Christian Newman , Ali Ouni , Zhe Yu

Software development is a collaborative process that involves various interactions among individuals and teams. TODO comments in source code play a critical role in managing and coordinating diverse tasks during this process. However, this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Haoye Wang , Zhipeng Gao , Tingting Bi , John Grundy , Xinyu Wang , Minghui Wu , Xiaohu Yang

Developers write logging statements to generate logs that provide run-time information for various tasks. The readability of log messages in the logging statements (i.e., the descriptive text) is rather crucial to the value of the generated…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Zhenhao Li , An Ran Chen , Xing Hu , Xin Xia , Tse-Hsun Chen , Weiyi Shang

Commit messages are natural language descriptions of code changes, which are important for software evolution such as code understanding and maintenance. However, previous methods are trained on the entire dataset without considering the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Wei Tao , Yucheng Zhou , Yanlin Wang , Hongyu Zhang , Haofen Wang , Wenqiang Zhang

High-quality commit messages are critical for maintaining software projects, yet ensuring their consistency and informativeness remains a practical challenge. While the Conventional Commits Specification (CCS) provides a structured format…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Zirui Wan , Zhaonan Wu , Xinyi Hou , Yanjie Zhao , Pengcheng Xia , Haoyu Wang

Automatic testing is a widely adopted technique for improving software quality. Software developers add, remove and update test methods and test classes as part of the software development process as well as during the evolution phase,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2017-09-27 Stanislav Levin , Amiram Yehudai

Many software metrics are designed to measure aspects that are believed to be related to software quality. Static software metrics, e.g., size, complexity and coupling are used in defect prediction research as well as software quality…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Alexander Trautsch , Johannes Erbel , Steffen Herbold , Jens Grabowski

A commit message describes the main code changes in a commit and plays a crucial role in software maintenance. Existing commit message generation (CMG) approaches typically frame it as a direct mapping which inputs a code diff and produces…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Bo Xiong , Linghao Zhang , Chong Wang , Peng Liang

Commit Message Generation (CMG) approaches aim to automatically generate commit messages based on given code diffs, which facilitate collaboration among developers and play a critical role in Open-Source Software (OSS). Very recently, Large…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Pengyu Xue , Linhao Wu , Zhongxing Yu , Zhi Jin , Zhen Yang , Xinyi Li , Zhenyu Yang , Yue Tan

In collaborative open-source development, the rationale for code changes is often captured in commit messages, making them a rich source of valuable information. However, research on rationale in commit messages remains limited. In this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Mouna Dhaouadi , Bentley James Oakes , Michalis Famelis

Commit messages record code changes (e.g., feature modifications and bug repairs) in natural language, and are useful for program comprehension. Due to the frequent updates of software and time cost, developers are generally unmotivated to…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Shangqing Liu , Cuiyun Gao , Sen Chen , Lun Yiu Nie , Yang Liu

Source code is changed for a reason, e.g., to adapt, correct, or adapt it. This reason can provide valuable insight into the development process but is rarely explicitly documented when the change is committed to a source code repository.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2021-05-03 Sebastian Hönel , Morgan Ericsson , Welf Löwe , Anna Wingkvist

Communication is a crucial social factor in the success of software projects, as positively or negatively perceived statements can influence how recipients feel and affect team collaboration through emotional contagion. Whether a developer…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Martin Obaidi , Marc Herrmann , Jendrik Martensen , Jil Klünder , Kurt Schneider

Commit messages have an important impact in software development, especially when working in large teams. Multiple developers who have a different style of writing may often be involved in the same project. For this reason, it may be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Nicolae-Teodor Pavel , Traian Rebedea

The informativeness of security-related commit messages is crucial for patch triage: when high, it enables the rapid distribution and deployment of security fixes. Prior research (Reis et al., 2023) reported, however, that commit messages…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Syful Islam , Stefano Zacchiroli

We propose a novel task of jointly repairing program codes and generating commit messages. Code repair and commit message generation are two essential and related tasks for software development. However, existing work usually performs the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Jiaqi Bai , Long Zhou , Ambrosio Blanco , Shujie Liu , Furu Wei , Ming Zhou , Zhoujun Li

Recent works have proposed that software developers' positive emotion has a positive impact on software developers' productivity. In this paper we investigate two data sources: developers chat messages (from Slack and Hipchat) and source…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Miikka Kuutila , Mika Mäntylä , Maëlick Claes

Many software developers rely on open source software for developing their applications and writing their source codes. Measuring an independent project's overall productivity is still an open problem for many technology companies. In this…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Sairamvinay Vijayaraghavan , Jinxiao Song , Terry Guan , Seongwoo Choi , Sutej Kulkarni