  A software release note is one of the essential documents in the software
development life cycle. The software release contains a set of information,
e.g., bug fixes and security fixes. Release notes are used in different phases,
e.g., requirement engineering, software testing and release management.
Different types of practitioners (e.g., project managers and clients) get
benefited from the release notes to understand the overview of the latest
release. As a result, several studies have been done about release notes
production and usage in practice. However, two significant problems (e.g.,
duplication and inconsistency in release notes contents) exist in producing
well-written & well-structured release notes and organizing appropriate
information regarding different targeted users' needs. For that reason,
practitioners face difficulties in writing and reading the release notes using
existing tools. To mitigate these problems, we execute two different studies in
our paper. First, we execute an exploratory study by analyzing 3,347 release
notes of 21 GitHub repositories to understand the documented contents of the
release notes. As a result, we find relevant key artifacts, e.g., issues (29%),
pull-requests (32%), commits (19%), and common vulnerabilities and exposures
(CVE) issues (6%) in the release note contents. Second, we conduct a survey
study with 32 professionals to understand the key information that is included
in release notes regarding users' roles. For example, project managers are more
interested in learning about new features than less critical bug fixes. Our
study can guide future research directions to help practitioners produce the
release notes with relevant content and improve the documentation quality.
