| > Ours isn’t much better. Each commit message has a mandatory ticket number you have to enter. So for details you need to jump to the ticket. In my perfect world people would write self-contained commit messages. Links to non-essential elaborations is fine. But what we have is often (ticket + some bare-bones explanation of what the code change does without explaining why). Okay, so that’s annoying that I have to click through to a slow issue tracker instance for every commit. But maybe people just want an easily changeable (unlike immutable commits) place to write down what this is about. Is the issue tracker that? Ideally (or second-to-ideally; see first paragraph) the title and description explain what the problem is. If this was a long back and forth issue then hopefully someone has updated the description to point to exactly what the PR/commits are supposed to do. More likely though is that the issue is a stream of consciousness: - Naive title - Naive description - Back and forth troubleshooting in the comments - The tech lead shoots in with “so, i guess <discard everything> and do X” And that’s the average good case. I’ve been complaining recently (maybe on two occasions) that I as a secondary (to the tech lead) PR reviewer can’t even easily figure out what the PR is supposed to do based on the issue. So there is no curation or editing. Even though the issue tracker is elevated to be the source of code change truth by mandating that commits need to have the issue id in the title but almost nothing else is demanded of the commit message. Now compare all of that to—no matter what is in the issue tracker, no matter if it has good or bad information—taking five minutes in order to write a commit message (or just a PR description which you can use in the merge commit) on a change which took in total three hours to work on with all the back and forth and testing and debugging. Now the snapshot of your understanding of the issue at the time of writing the commit/PR stays there forever, without any need for hyperlinks or external tools. |