Automatic Release Notes Generation: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Release Notes (RNs) play a vital role in software development. RNs are one of the essential artifacts about a new release of the software. Despite their importance, RNs are usually generated manually. Generating them manually prone to errors and time consuming as it contains a description of new features, bug fixes, license changes, deprecated libraries, new Application Program Interface (API), and other changes made to the software. There are different tools available to generate RNs automatically from issue tracker and source code repositories. Researchers are working on the automation of RNs from decades to enhance the software development process. In this paper, we present the algorithms published by different researchers, available plugins, and tools in the market for this task. This survey of the past techniques used for the automation of RNs are useful and broad background knowledge of this research field to future researchers.