[fatnoah]

> But just in terms of "what would I rather have", a link to the ticket every time

In practice over the past 20+ years, I've had to rely on commit messages far more than tickets, but a well-written ticket is defnitely awesome to have. When I ran Engineering for a startup, one of the things we invested a lot of time in was making sure commits had good messages, tickets had good writeups, and the two were linked. We required a pull request to close a ticket, and our CI system would automatically append a link to the ticket to the PR when it was merged. It was such a level of awesomesauce.

[democracy]

Just out of curiosity - how many different CVS did you use in the past 20+ years?

I went through 5 different CVSs and the history was gone forever in each migration - but actually JIRA is still the same after 16 years )))

[fatnoah]

Obviously my experience is my own, but in many cases it was the ticket system that changed vs. the version control system, which is why history wasn't always there. A lot of my early experience was at startups and I think I saw a version control migration only happen once (VSS to Git). I've even seen a couple places that didn't even have a ticket system. Unsurprisingly, those no longer exist.

In any case, I think the "correct" answer is proper commit messages AND solid issue tracking. My preference for commit when looking in the past was more around trying to understand particular changes to specific files or lines of code, which are more easily navigated in source control. A good commit message helps narrow down things when there is a long history, but a link in that message to the actual ticket would be a dream since that would likely have the larger context.

All that said, I have spent some time at a FAANG and neither commit messages nor tickets were useful at all there. Commit messages were usually along the lines of "fix a bug" or "add a feature" and the tickets rarely had more detail than "fix X" or "add Y". That was more of a symptom of the "go forward" culture there. Little time was spent making it easier for the next person since that wasn't really rewarded in the performance process.