A First Look at Self-Admitted Miscommunications in GitHub Issues

Effective communication is crucial for the success of open-source software development, particularly within distributed and asynchronous working environments on collaborative coding supporting platforms like GitHub. However, these environments often present significant communication challenges due to various factors, leading to project delays and wasted efforts. Despite prior research on collaboration challenges in software teams, there is a notable gap in understanding what, when, and where miscommunications occur in open-source projects. To address this gap, we mined 6,444 GitHub issues where developers explicitly admitted to miscommunication (using keywords such as "miscommunication") and manually analyzed the types, timing, and root causes of these self-admitted instances on a statistically significant sample set (363). Our findings are: (1) we developed a taxonomy of 12 issue types where miscommunications frequently occur, with bug reporting and feature requests being the most common; (2) we identified that most miscommunications occur before issue closure, but post-closure miscommunications, though less frequent, pose significant challenges; and (3) we uncovered five primary root causes of miscommunication, with technical misunderstandings being the most prevalent. This study provides the first comprehensive examination of miscommunication in open-source software development, offering insights and recommendations for researchers and practitioners to improve communication practices in GitHub issue discussions.