Classifying Release Notes Explanations using BERT: An Initial Step to Automatic Versioning in Distributed Software Development

Abstract

Distributed Software Development is the practice of developing software with a team in different locations. The process of software versioning is crucial in distributed development as it helps in keeping track of the various software versions that are being developed and maintaining projects. In transition of each new version, the development team present release notes that inform all team members and stakeholders are aware of changes and provide tracking project progresses. Release notes consist information about the features, bug fixes, and other changes included in a new software release. Generating release notes and determining the release transition timing for new software versions can be costly. Despite of there are some papers about generating release notes in the literature, there is not any study about automatic versioning. In this context, the aim of this paper is to predict the development types in release notes as the first phase of an automated versioning tool that is planned to be built in future work. We used BERT which is one of the popular transformers to classify developments of release notes and our model has 86% accuracy rate on our own public dataset. Additionally, we presented insights on the model's decision-making process in the context of explainable AI using ELI5 library.