Automatic Release Notes Generation

Release Notes (RNs) are one of the important artifacts in software development and maintenance. As, RNs are required when a new release of a software is planned to deploy. They contain all the changes made to the new release of project i.e. description of new features, improvements, bug fixes, deprecated features, etc. Generating these notes manually is a very complex, and time-consuming task. In this paper, we present an approach for generating RNs automatically. We implemented the approach in python and generate these notes for node.js projects. Our system extracts changes from Git repository, summarize changes, get deprecated features, get library changes, fetch issues from issue tracker, and link these issues to code, etc. Our system hierarchically set up these changes and produce an output in a document. We evaluated our results manually from 14 industry developers. The results obtained from our system shows that these RNs are very good and accurate than ones always produced manually.