How Do You Maintain Your Change Log?

We’re coming up to that point in development again where we need to do up a change log for a release. Ephox has never really gotten this process down pat so it inevitably leads to trawling through a back log of subversion commit logs and bugzilla reports. It always feels like there should be a better way to do it, but it’s always too easy to forget to add something to the change log if you try to keep it up to date all the time.

Doug suggested today that the XP approach to change logs would be to keep it up to date each iteration. Since each iteration is a release – even if in our case it doesn’t always go out to end users – it should be documented as such. The net result would be that when we release we just need to combine the change logs from the iterations since the last release. It’s something that could be added in to my Monday morning iteration clean up and kick start. I’m already pulling the completed story cards down off the wall and noting down the weeks velocity. It shouldn’t take too much to add change log entries for each of the completed stories as well. Then we just need to be strict about never changing anything without a story card which isn’t too far from the situation today.

Is there a better way? How do other people handle change logs?