Automated Generation of Commit Messages in Software Repositories

Commit messages are crucial for documenting software changes, aiding in program comprehension and maintenance. However, creating effective commit messages is often overlooked by developers due to time constraints and varying levels of documentation skills. Our research presents an automated approach to generate commit messages using Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) by developing models that use techniques such as Logistic Regression with TF-IDF and Word2Vec, as well as more sophisticated methods like LSTM. We used the dataset of code changes and corresponding commit messages that was used by Liu et al., which we used to train and evaluate ML/NLP models and was chosen because it is extensively used in previous research, also for comparability in our study. The objective was to explore which ML/NLP techniques generate the most effective, clear, and concise commit messages that accurately reflect the code changes. We split the dataset into training, validation, and testing sets and used these sets to evaluate the performance of each model using qualitative and quantitative evaluation methods. Our results reveal a spectrum of effectiveness among these models, with the highest BLEU score achieved being 16.82, showcasing the models' capability in automating a clear and concise commit message generation. Our paper offers insights into the comparative effectiveness of different machine learning models for automating commit message generation in software development, aiming to enhance the overall practice of code documentation. The source code is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10888106.