SmartNote: An LLM-powered, Personalised Release Note Generator That Just Works

The release note is a crucial document outlining changes in new software versions. It plays a key role in helping stakeholders recognise important changes and understand the implications behind them. Despite this fact, many developers view the process of writing software release notes as a tedious and dreadful task. Consequently, numerous tools (e.g., DeepRelease and Conventional Changelog) have been developed by researchers and practitioners to automate the generation of software release notes. However, these tools fail to consider project domain and target audience for personalisation, limiting their relevance and conciseness. Additionally, they suffer from limited applicability, often necessitating significant workflow adjustments and adoption efforts, hindering practical use and stressing developers. Despite recent advancements in natural language processing and the proven capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in various code and text-related tasks, there are no existing studies investigating the integration and utilisation of LLMs in automated release note generation. Therefore, we propose SmartNote, a novel and widely applicable release note generation approach that produces high-quality, contextually personalised release notes by leveraging LLM capabilities to aggregate, describe, and summarise changes based on code, commit, and pull request details. It categorises and scores (for significance) commits to generate structured and concise release notes of prioritised changes. We conduct human and automatic evaluations that reveal SmartNote outperforms or achieves comparable performance to DeepRelease (state-of-the-art), Conventional Changelog (off-the-shelf), and the projects' original release note across four quality metrics: completeness, clarity, conciseness, and organisation. In both evaluations, SmartNote ranked first for completeness and organisation, while clarity ranked first in the human evaluation. Furthermore, our controlled study reveals the significance of contextual awareness, while our applicability analysis confirms SmartNote's effectiveness across diverse projects.