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When conversations turn into work: a taxonomy of converted discussions and issues in GitHub

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Abstract

Popular and large contemporary open-source projects now embrace a diverse set of documentation for communication channels. Examples include contribution guidelines (i.e., commit message guidelines, coding rules, submission guidelines), code of conduct (i.e., rules and behavior expectations), governance policies, and Q&A forum. In 2020, GitHub released Discussion to distinguish between communication and collaboration. However, it remains unclear how developers maintain these channels, how trivial it is, and whether deciding on conversion takes time. We conducted an empirical study on 259 NPM and 148 PyPI repositories, devising two taxonomies of reasons for converting discussions into issues and vice-versa. The most frequent conversion from a discussion to an issue is when developers request a contributor to clarify their idea into an issue (Reporting a Clarification Request –35.1% and 34.7%, respectively), while agreeing that having non actionable topic (QA, ideas, feature requests –55.0% and 42.0%, respectively) is the most frequent reason of converting an issue into a discussion. Furthermore, we show that not all reasons for conversion are trivial (e.g., not a bug), and raising a conversion intent potentially takes time (i.e., a median of 15.2 and 35.1 h, respectively, taken from issues to discussions). Our work contributes to complementing the GitHub guidelines and helping developers effectively utilize the Issue and Discussion communication channels to maintain their collaboration.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the https://github.com/posl/GitHub_Discussion_Conversion

Notes

  1. https://github.blog/2020-05-06-new-from-satellite-2020-github-codespaces-github-discussions-securing-code-in-private-repositories-and-more/

  2. https://resources.github.com/devops/process/planning/discussions/

  3. https://libraries.io/

  4. https://graphql.org/

  5. https://github.com/sbaltes/github-retriever/

  6. https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

  7. https://github.com/prisma/prisma/discussions/10488

  8. https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/discussions/6099

  9. https://github.com/eslint/eslint/discussions/14669

  10. https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/discussions/32147

  11. https://github.com/Automattic/mongoose/discussions/10516

  12. https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/discussions/8106

  13. https://github.com/grafana/grafana/discussions/46356

  14. https://github.com/logaretm/vee-validate/discussions/3723

  15. https://github.com/keycloak/keycloak/discussions/8988

  16. https://github.com/serialport/node-serialport/discussions/2287

  17. https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/discussions/31283

  18. https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/discussions/11405

  19. https://github.com/date-fns/date-fns/discussions/2841

  20. https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/12325

  21. https://github.com/vercel/next.js/discussions/27756

  22. https://github.com/apache/superset/discussions/19185

  23. https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design/discussions/29818

  24. https://github.com/apache/airflow/discussions/14315

  25. https://github.com/invertase/react-native-firebase/discussions/4290

  26. https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/14457

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI grants (JP20K19774, JP20H05706, JP22K17874, JP21H04877, JP23K16864), and JSPS and SNSF for the project “SENSOR” (JPJSJRP20191502).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Dong Wang, Masanari Kondo, Yasutaka Kamei & Naoyasu Ubayashi

  2. Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma, Japan

    Raula Gaikovina Kula

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  1. Dong Wang
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  2. Masanari Kondo
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  3. Yasutaka Kamei
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  4. Raula Gaikovina Kula
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Correspondence to Dong Wang.

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The authors declare that Raula Gaikovina Kula and Yasutaka Kamei are members of the EMSE Editorial Board. All co-authors have seen and agreed with the contents of the manuscript and there is no financial interest to report.

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Communicated by: Jeffrey C. Carver

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Wang, D., Kondo, M., Kamei, Y. et al. When conversations turn into work: a taxonomy of converted discussions and issues in GitHub. Empir Software Eng 28, 138 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10366-z

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