Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
10-2022
Abstract
With the rise of the pull request mechanism in software development, the quality of pull requests has gained more attention. Prior works focus on improving the quality of pull request descriptions and several approaches have been proposed to automatically generate pull request descriptions. As an essential component of a pull request, pull request titles have not received a similar level of attention. To further facilitate automation in software development and to help developers draft high-quality pull request titles, we introduce AutoPRTitle. AutoPRTitle is specifically designed to generate pull request titles automatically. AutoPRTitle can generate a precise and succinct pull request title based on the pull request description, commit messages, and the associated issue titles. AutoPRTitle is built upon a state-of-the-art text summarization model, BART, which has been pre-trained on large-scale English corpora. We further fine-tuned BART in a pull request dataset containing high-quality pull request titles. We implemented AutoPRTitle as a stand-alone web application. We conducted two sets of evaluations: one concerning the model accuracy and the other concerning the tool usability. For model accuracy, BART outperforms the best baseline by 24.6%, 40.5%, and 23.3%, respectively. For tool usability, the evaluators consider our tool as easy-to-use and useful when creating a pull request title of good quality.
Keywords
Pull request, GitHub, Summarization, Pretrained models
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME): Limassol, Cyprus, October 2-7: Proceedings
First Page
454
Last Page
458
ISBN
9781665479561
Identifier
10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00058
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Citation
IRSAN, Ivana Clairine; ZHANG, Ting; THUNG, Ferdian; LO, David; and JIANG, Lingxiao.
AUTOPRTITLE: A tool for automatic pull request title generation. (2022). 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME): Limassol, Cyprus, October 2-7: Proceedings. 454-458.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7700
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME55016.2022.00058