Automatic generation of release notes

Laura Moreno, Gabriele Bavota, Massimiliano Di Penta, Rocco Oliveto, Andrian Marcus, Gerardo Canfora

Abstract

This paper introduces ARENA (Automatic RElease Notes generAtor), an approach for the automatic generation of release notes. ARENA extracts changes from the source code, summarizes them, and integrates them with information from versioning systems and issue trackers. It was designed based on the manual analysis of 1,000 existing release notes. To evaluate the quality of the ARENA release notes, we performed three empirical studies involving a total of 53 participants (45 professional developers and 8 students). The results indicate that the ARENA release notes are very good approximations of those produced by developers and often include important information that is missing in the manually produced release notes.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Moreno-al:FSE14,
  author    = {Laura Moreno and
               Gabriele Bavota and
               Massimiliano Di Penta and
               Rocco Oliveto and
               Andrian Marcus and
               Gerardo Canfora},
  title     = {Automatic generation of release notes},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  pages     = {484--495},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2014},
}

Automatic generation of release notes

Abstract

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