[twhitmore]

As an architect working on maintenance & refactoring, I find regular value in being able to understand the context (issue tracker ticket) in which a commit was made.

Also more than mildly useful for devs doing porting work.

Commit comments are rarely substantive enough, and "asking relevant people" is nice but not an actual substitute for keeping meaningful records.

[wizofaus]

I can recall multiple times I've determined why the current logic in the code should be not simplified as part of refactoring or fixing a bug after tracking down the original ticket associated with a commit. That original ticket is quite often a bug report, and sure enough, there was actually a good explanation for why the code is written the way it is, which is almost never going to be captured in commit or inline comments. While having an associated unit test is arguably a better way to capture the reason for such code changes, there are many reasons that's far less likely to exist than a JIRA ticket or equivalent.