CoMRAT: Commit Message Rationale Analysis Tool

TL;DR

CoMRAT is a tool designed to analyze and quantify decision rationale in commit messages, aiding researchers and developers in understanding and improving the quality of rationale documentation in open-source projects.

Contribution

The paper introduces CoMRAT, a novel tool for analyzing rationale sentences in commit messages, facilitating research and development activities.

Findings

Preliminary evaluation indicates the tool's usefulness.

The tool is usable for both research and development.

Enables metrics and analysis of rationale in GitHub modules.

Abstract

In collaborative open-source development, the rationale for code changes is often captured in commit messages, making them a rich source of valuable information. However, research on rationale in commit messages remains limited. In this paper, we present CoMRAT, a tool for analyzing decision and rationale sentences rationale in commit messages. CoMRAT enables a) researchers to produce metrics and analyses on rationale information in any Github module, and b) developers to check the amount of rationale in their commit messages. A preliminary evaluation suggests the tool's usefulness and usability in both these research and development contexts.