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by weinzierl 724 days ago
We considered generating the changelog from the git commits, the information contained in the PR and from the ticket.

Ultimately we also decided to go with the tickets, but I am curious what your reasoning was to go that way?

1 comments

Sadly, we didn't end up implementing it ourselves. Release notes were a "nice to have" so it became one of those things that gets kicked down the road.

The primary advantage of the ticket-based approach is that it's much easier to involve non-dev stakeholders. I'd choose it whenever other people might want input in the process. Most ticketing systems also offer a lot of flexibility, you could incorporate the ticket name, group tickets by relation, block completion states, act on deployments, etc. The ability to edit the note without rebasing is a major bonus as well.

The git-based approach potentially leads to a more readable commit history, and strongly associates any release notes with the actual code change. On the other hand, it's a pain to edit and can distract devs while they're problem solving if not setup well.

The reason I didn’t go with a ticket-based approach is that we don’t have a perfect 1-to-1 mapping of commits to tickets. The worry was that we would miss commits because they weren’t well-associated. Because the tool we made is web-based, it’s a little less scary for non-devs.