Source Control Change Messages: How Are They Used And What Do They Mean?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Source control systems permit developers to attach a free form message to every committed change. The content of these change messages is rarely investigated and little is known about their use by developers while they maintain their code. We present the results of a survey we conducted with professional software developers. The purpose of this survey was to investigate how developers make use of these messages and what type of information exists in them. We also investigated the possibility of using automated techniques which examine change messages and determine their purpose, for example that a change was done to fix a bug or to indent the code. We also asked developers to compare change messages in open source software systems to change messages in commercial systems. The findings of our survey suggest that change messages are a valuable resource used by practitioners to maintain and manage software projects, for example to understand the code when they are fixing a bug. Moreover, change messages in open source projects are similar to messages that professional developers encounter in large industrial projects. An automated approach to determine the purpose of a change using the change message is likely to produce results similar to a manual analysis performed by professional developers. Researchers should investigate techniques and approaches to improve the quality of the change messages and to make them more accessible for developers as they evolve software systems.
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