How are discussions linked? A link analysis study on GitHub Discussions

Software development requires collaborative efforts and consensus among developers, emphasizing the need for effective communication and knowledge sharing within the teams. In line with this, GitHub introduced GitHub Discussions, a collaborative communication feature for the community around an open-source or internal project. The user-friendly interface of Discussions facilitates easy sharing of links to different resources. Maintainers highlight this feature's significance, enabling users to maintain a well-informed project environment. We hypothesize that link-sharing activities in Discussions contribute to disseminating project knowledge. To investigate this hypothesis, we conducted a mixed-method study combining qualitative and quantitative analysis based on a convenience sample of ten open-source projects. We aimed to gain insight into the scope and intentions behind these shared links. Our findings indicate that link-sharing activities are common in the Discussions. Users share links to resources directly or indirectly related to the project/repository. Discussions users share links to project documentation, source code, and issues, aiming to clarify concepts, provide supplementary information, offer context to questions, and suggest new features. These findings offer insights for project maintainers to understand Discussions usage better and enable the GitHub Engineering team to promote the feature adoption.