GitHub Discussions: An exploratory study of early adoption

Abstract

Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software projects. To understand how developers use this novel feature, how they perceive it, and how it impacts the development processes, we conducted a mixed-methods study based on early adopters of GitHub discussions from January until July 2020. We found that: (1) errors, unexpected behavior, and code reviews are prevalent discussion categories; (2) there is a positive relationship between project member involvement and discussion frequency; (3) developers consider GitHub Discussions useful but face the problem of topic duplication between Discussions and Issues; (4) Discussions play a crucial role in advancing the development of projects; and (5) positive sentiment in Discussions is more frequent than in Stack Overflow posts. Our findings are a first step towards data-informed guidance for using GitHub Discussions, opening up avenues for future work on this novel communication channel.

Looking for related discussions on GitHub Discussions

“…The Discussions is a collaborative communication forum for OSS maintainers, code and non-code contributors, newcomers, and users to discuss projects' use, development, and updates in a single place without third-party tools (GitHub, 2022(GitHub, , 2021a. In addition, the Discussions stands out for being a place to distinguish day-to-day conversations and conversations aimed at engineering teams (Issues or Pull Request) (Hata et al, 2022).…”

“…Concerned with helping the development and management of OSS projects hosted on GitHub, in 2020, the company announced GitHub Discussions Hata et al, 2022). In order to be "A new way for software communities to collaborate outside the codebase" (Niyogi, 2020), the GitHub Discussions forum provides opportunities for OSS communities to interact and discuss project-related issues collaboratively.…”

“…In order to be "A new way for software communities to collaborate outside the codebase" (Niyogi, 2020), the GitHub Discussions forum provides opportunities for OSS communities to interact and discuss project-related issues collaboratively. The Discussions forum is a place where OSS communities can talk about work, ask questions, plan new releases, request code reviews, make announcements, disclose information, recruit contributors, get insights into the project, feature important information, or simply chat (Hata et al, 2022;.…”

“…Although both GitHub Discussions and Stack Overflow resemble a PCQA forum, they differ regarding the communicative intentions behind the posts. Posts on GitHub Discussions cover a software project ecosystem (Hata et al, 2022) (on GitHub, each project has its own forum). Stack Overflow questions cover a broader context; they aim to answer developers' technical questions regardless of a specific software project.…”

Automatically Categorising GitHub Repositories by Application Domain

“…Our work aims to help researchers and practitioners identify relevant repositories for their use cases, offering a trade-off between accuracy and volume to many who have manually annotated repositories using Borges et al (2016)'s classification (Bi et al, 2021(Bi et al, , 2022Coelho and Valente, 2017;De Stefano et al, 2020Hata et al, 2022;Hayashi et al, 2019;Rehman et al, 2022;Tamburri et al, 2019) or intend to use it in future work (Bayati and Heidary, 2019;De Stefano et al, 2022;Wu, 2020;Wu et al, 2020a,b;Zhang et al, 2020). For example, Bi et al (2022) manually annotated 1,000 repositories in terms of their application domain using the Borges et al taxonomy to investigate release note production and usage of release notes in practice, and Hayashi et al (2019) manually annotated 969 repositories in terms of their application domain to investigate the impacts of daylight saving time on software development.…”