Git Commit Messages
Help Your Future Self
Jun 19, 2022
Recently, I was looking at my commit messages. I wasn’t able to comprehend some of them. I thought to myself, “there must be a better way.”
Lucky, there is a research paper that addresses this question. “What Makes a Good Commit Message?”
It is the consolidation of:
- 46 research papers
- 50 secondary sources
- 30 expert opinions
A good message must answer these two questions:
- Why was the change required?
- What was changed?
Moreover, the researchers followed an empirical approach. They constructed a data set from popular open-source repositories and created a machine-learning algorithm to classify good messages based on these two criteria.
Check the results from the link below:
