At Couchbase, we have a commit message standard which has proven useful. All git commit messages must start with a short one-line summary of no more than 60 characters or so. Then a blank line, followed by additional details, specifics, etc. all on lines of no more than 72 characters. If it's a simple enough change that the one-line summary is all you need, that's fine too.
Additionally, if the commit is for a specific ticket, that ticket number must be at the beginning of the summary line, followed by a colon. FYI our tickets in Jira are named eg. ASTERIXDB-1097. So, for example: ------ ASTERIXDB-1097: Fix threading in printers Replace static data member with a safe thread-local instance to avoid data corruption. ------ This really helps in tracking git history - there are several commands which will only display the first line of a commit message, for instance, so having it be self-contained makes it much easier to read. You may also have noticed that Gerrit uses that first line for the subjects of emails it sends out. Also, by including the ticket name, we can easily configure Gerrit to provide a hyperlink to the ticket to make things easier to review. Here's a blog post which goes into excruciating detail about commit messages: http://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/ Ceej aka Chris Hillery
