Commit messages play a crucial role in collaborative software development. They provide a clear and concise description of the changes made to the source code. However, many commit messages among students' projects lack useful information. This is a concern, as low-quality commit messages can negatively impact communication of software development and future maintenance. To address this issue, this research aims to help students write high-quality commit messages by "nudging" them in the right direction. We modified the GitHub Desktop application by incorporating specific requirements for commit messages, specifically "what" and "why" parts. To test whether this affects the quality of commit messages, we divided students from an Information Retrieval class into two groups, with one group using the modified application and the other using other interfaces. The results show that the quality of commit messages is improved in terms of informativeness, clearness, and length.

翻译：提交信息在协作式软件开发中扮演着关键角色，它们清晰简洁地描述了源代码的变更内容。然而，学生项目中的许多提交信息缺乏有用信息。这一现象值得关注，因为低质量的提交信息会阻碍软件开发沟通与后期维护。为解决这一问题，本研究旨在通过"引导"学生走向正确方向，帮助他们撰写高质量的提交信息。我们对GitHub Desktop应用程序进行了修改，为提交信息增加了具体要求，即明确区分"内容变更"与"变更原因"两部分。为验证该方法对提交信息质量的影响，我们将一门信息检索课程的学生分为两组，分别使用修改后的应用程序与其他界面。结果表明，提交信息在信息量、清晰度和长度方面均得到提升。