Week 3 Dig: The inscriptions
Reading the inscriptions — commit messages as primary sources for a team's communication norms, morale, and working patterns.
8 March 2027
Before the dig#
Read the last 100 commit messages on your dig site (or all of them if fewer than 100). Categorise each by type:
- Descriptive: says what changed and why (
Fix race condition in session cleanup) - Terse: says what changed but not why (
Fix bug,Update) - Opaque: says nothing useful (
wip,stuff,asdf,.) - Conventional: follows a named convention (
feat:,fix:,chore:)
Count the proportions. What do they tell you about the team?
In the session#
Compare proportions across the class. Projects with high descriptive rates and projects with high opaque rates have something to say about team health, review culture, and whether the authors expected anyone else to read the history. Discuss: is a terse commit message a sign of low effort, high velocity, or working alone?
Afterwards#
Find the single most diagnostic commit message in your dig site — the one that reveals the most about the project’s life that the code alone would not. Write 100 words explaining what it tells you.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have categorised your dig site's commit messages by convention and quality
- you can describe the team's communication norms without reading their code
- you have identified at least one commit message that reveals something the code alone would not
Teaching team
- Maren Voss — convenor