Improving the Quality of Commit Messages in Students’ Projects

Commit messages play a crucial role in collaborative software development. They provide a clear and concise description of the changes made to the source code. However, many commit messages among students’ projects lack useful information. This is a concern, as low-quality commit messages can negatively impact communication of software development and future maintenance. To address this issue, this research aims to help students write high-quality commit messages by “nudging” them in the right direction. We modified the GitHub Desktop application by incorporating specific requirements for commit messages, specifically “what” and “why” parts. To test whether this affects the quality of commit messages, we divided students from an Information Retrieval class into two groups, with one group using the modified application and the other using other interfaces. The results show that the quality of commit messages is improved in terms of informativeness, clearness, and length.

提交消息在协作软件开发中起着至关重要的作用。消息会对软件开发和未来维护的沟通产生负面影响，以解决此问题，该研究旨在帮助学生通过在正确的方向。一组使用修改后的应用程序，另一组使用其他接口。清晰和长度。