Beyond Similarity-Based Generation: Guiding Commit Message Generation with Issue-Commit Traceability

Overview & Synopsis

Commit messages provide records of code changes and help developers understand and maintain software. To reduce the manual effort involved in writing them, commit message generation (CMG) approaches automatically generate commit messages that describe code changes in natural language. Existing CMG approaches generally treat CMG as a standalone task and optimize generated messages primarily for similarity to developer-written references. However, this objective may not properly reflect the practical usefulness of generated commit messages. This limitation matters in current AI-assisted software engineering workflows, where commit messages are used as shared information to serve different software engineering activities. To fill this gap, we propose TraceMsg, which uses issue-commit traceability, a representative software engineering activity, to guide commit message generation. TraceMsg is a collaborative multi-agent framework that coordinates message generation, traceability reasoning, and feedback-guided refinement, allowing generated messages to serve traceability while using reasoning feedback to guide issue-conditioned refinement. We evaluate TraceMsg on six open-source projects. The experimental results show that TraceMsg achieves an average Hit@1 of 0.893 and an MRR of 0.911, improving Hit@1 and MRR by 13.16% and 38.75%, respectively, over the best baseline for each metric.