Writing Changelog

Writing Changelog

The CHANGELOG.md file in the root directory contains all the changes and the date of every release. Here is described how these changes can be found, and in which way they should be written to the changelog.

Find changes

The first step to write a changelog is to find the new changes. Due to our Branching Model this is a quite easy task, if everybody follows it. The following command lists all commits since the last release as one-liners, which guarantees a good overview:

git log --oneline v[last-version]..release/v[current-version]

With the following command all merges are shown. This is very useful, as you can see every new feature and bugfix since the last release, which you can easily convert into a appealing format for the changelog (assuming that you are using a *nix-System).

git log --oneline v[last-version]..release/v[current-version] | grep merge

Extend the changelog

Write a new second level header with the version number and the date in parantheses. Afterwards list all the features and bugfixes since the last release (which can be received easily with the commands above). Each element has to consist of the merge commit id followed by a colon, and a short description of the change.