Exploring Relevant Artifacts of Release Notes: The Practitioners' Perspective
Sristy Sumana Nath, Banani Roy

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the contents of software release notes and surveys practitioners to identify key artifacts and user needs, aiming to improve the quality and relevance of release documentation.
Contribution
It provides an empirical analysis of release note contents and a survey of practitioners, highlighting key artifacts and user preferences to guide better release note practices.
Findings
Key artifacts include issues (29%), pull-requests (32%), commits (19%), CVEs (6%)
Practitioners prefer different information based on user roles, e.g., project managers focus on new features
Analysis of 3,347 release notes from 21 GitHub repositories
Abstract
A software release note is one of the essential documents in the software development life cycle. The software release contains a set of information, e.g., bug fixes and security fixes. Release notes are used in different phases, e.g., requirement engineering, software testing and release management. Different types of practitioners (e.g., project managers and clients) get benefited from the release notes to understand the overview of the latest release. As a result, several studies have been done about release notes production and usage in practice. However, two significant problems (e.g., duplication and inconsistency in release notes contents) exist in producing well-written & well-structured release notes and organizing appropriate information regarding different targeted users' needs. For that reason, practitioners face difficulties in writing and reading the release notes using…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Software System Performance and Reliability · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
