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Judging a commit by its cover: Correlating commit message entropy with build status on Travis-CI

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dc.contributor.authorSantos, E.A.
dc.contributor.authorHindle, Abram
dc.date.accessioned2025-05-01T02:06:30Z
dc.date.available2025-05-01T02:06:30Z
dc.date.issued2016
dc.descriptionDevelopers summarize their changes to code in commit messages. When a message seems "unusual", however, this puts doubt into the quality of the code contained in the commit. We trained n-gram language models and used cross-entropy as an indicator of commit message "unusualness" of over 120,000 commits from open source projects. Build statuses collected from Travis-CI were used as a proxy for code quality. We then compared the distributions of failed and successful commits with regards to the "unusualness" of their commit message. Our analysis yielded significant results when correlating cross-entropy with build status.
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.7939/r3-h4d8-ej76
dc.language.isoen
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectcommit message
dc.subjectgithub
dc.subjecttravis-ci
dc.subjectcross entropy
dc.subjectn-gram language model
dc.subjectbuild status
dc.subjectopen source
dc.titleJudging a commit by its cover: Correlating commit message entropy with build status on Travis-CI
dc.typehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/R60J-J5BD
ual.jupiterAccesshttp://terms.library.ualberta.ca/public

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