Exploring the relation between source code commit information and SonarQube issues

Commit classification has emerged as a practical approach to improve software quality, providing a systematic way to interpret development activities, measure their impact, and enhance overall software quality. The Conventional Commit Specification offers a structured, detailed framework to classify commits beyond traditional maintenance categories. In this study, we explore how conventional commit specification categories are distributed between software releases. We analyze 2,600 software release pairs of 57 Python open-source projects and employ large language models to label 90,318 commits. We identify which commit types are predominantly responsible for introducing SonarQube issues, and explore the relationship between commit types and clean-code attributes affected by quality issues. We publish our analysis dataset to enable replicating or extending our study. We find that most of the commit types are related to documentation and bug fixing, and the existence of a trend of focusing on improving code quality by tackling common code smells and adhering to best practices. We discuss the threats to the validity of our study and identify avenues for further exploration.