Proposal: Clearer definitions for Conventional Commit types

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We conducted a study and found that conventional commits are becoming increasingly popular among top open-source projects. Specifically, there is a stable uptrend in the adoption of conventional commits, with some projects mandating their use. By 2023, in repositories that do not require conventional commits, we found nearly 10% of commits were in line with the Conventional Commit format, indicating their popularity among developers.

During this process, we noticed that some commits, despite being conventional, clearly misused the commit message format, for example: feat: remove unnecessary lines from test file. This spurred our curiosity about the challenges developers face when categorizing commits using the conventional commits format. Therefore, we analyzed all the issues in this project, as well as the top 100 questions on Stack Overflow related to conventional commits. Our analysis identified four categories of challenges developers face, with the most common (around 57.7%) being confusion over which type to use. In the current CCS definition, categories other than 'feat' and 'fix' lack clear definitions, leading developers to rely on the categorizations used by Angular and other projects, which often overlap and lack clarity. For instance, in Angular's definition, 'refactor' is defined as "A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature," which could ambiguously include 'style', 'perf', 'test', among others.

We have proposed a clearer and less overlapping list of definitions based on our literature review and the documentation in repositories currently using conventional commits. Based on this, we have drafted an academic paper (you can find more detailed information about the above here), which has undergone peer review and been accepted by ICSE 2025, a premier software engineering conference.

We are happy to provide additional details or clarification about our methodology and findings. We look forward to any feedback you may have.