On the Use of Commit Messages for Corrective Software Maintenance: A Systematic Mapping Study

TL;DR

This systematic mapping study analyzes 97 sources from 2004 to 2025, highlighting the growing use of commit messages in corrective software maintenance, especially for bug analysis and fix identification, with NLP and AI/ML as key methodologies.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of how commit messages are utilized in corrective maintenance research, identifying key themes, methodologies, and stakeholder roles.

Findings

Commit messages are increasingly used for bug analysis and fix identification.

Most studies combine commit messages with diffs and use NLP/AI/ML techniques.

Developers are the primary stakeholders influencing corrective maintenance practices.

Abstract

Corrective maintenance is crucial to ensure the quality of software, thereby improving reliability and user experience. In a version control system (VCS), developers write commit messages to document their changes and support later maintenance. Still, to this day, no secondary study has mapped the research landscape of how commit messages have been used in corrective software maintenance. We present a systematic mapping study of 97 primary sources published between 2004 and May 2025, where we examine the goals, potential utilization of source code artifacts along with commit messages, methodologies, stakeholders, and the key findings about their influence on corrective maintenance. Our analysis reveals a growing interest in the usage of commit messages to perform corrective maintenance tasks, in particular for bug analysis and bug fix identification goals. Surprisingly few studies address other themes such as automated program repair, security development practices, etc. We find that the software artifacts most used in combination with commit messages are commit "diffs" and that repository mining, together with natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) are the methodological foundations of studies in this field. Among stakeholders considered in previous studies, developers play the most important role in shaping corrective maintenance practices. Key findings in previous studies about commit messages establish their significant role in corrective maintenance, due to the fact that they carry crucial information helpful for stakeholders to understand and improve the code base through the software evolution process. Often, though, commit messages lack important information and are not enough to convey the intent of code changes to future readers.