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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Question templates for guidance

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Question templates for guidance

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I am wondering if it makes sense to define a template for questions. This would act as a guideline rather than a strict template to be followed.

I have seen this being used for GitHub issues and I think it would help virtually all users to tick some points when asking most of the software development questions (i.e. "debug" questions)

A full example was provided on MSO and it can be a good start for us. Some points that can be included in the template:

  • short description
  • the actual goal. This is relevant to avoid XY problems
  • relevant code for the issue
  • problem manifestation - logged error, stack trace, actual result different from the expected result etc.
  • (optional, but recommended) what has been tried to tackle the issue

One way to quickly implement this is as a default text for the Q&A category questions.

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1 comment thread

Sounds similar to the tour/question wizard (2 comments)
Sounds similar to the tour/question wizard
Lundin‭ wrote over 2 years ago · edited over 2 years ago

The beginner tour: https://meta.codidact.com/tour

Alexei‭ wrote over 2 years ago

Lundin‭ It is similar to that (did not know it exists, but it is a very nice thing). However, I think it is easier to have a default text for a question directly as a question body. I guess this is the main reason why GitHub uses this method: it helps the user not to forget to include important information.

Clearly, we cannot design a one size fits all solution (e.g. software-architecture related questions do not fit), but at least the poster knows what to consider before submitting a question.