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Asking software architecture related questions on Software Development community
Context
Over the years I had a hard time addressing questions about software architecture like these ones .
Soon after posting them, they receive a couple of downvotes and close votes which set the message that these are not welcomed in that community.
One comment indicated that the community is against all sort of "pros and cons" related questions.
However, one experienced user pointed out that there is a chronical issue with the community de facto rejecting "not so bad questions" (i.e. can be improved with a relative small effort).
Main issue
I would like to know if this type of questions is welcomed on Software Development Codidact. For me it was quite a frustration to not be able to address them and also feel welcomed and I never understood why. These are an important part of any senior developer's job: understanding the pros and cons of various software architectures.
Question: Are software architecture related questions welcomed on Software Development community?
2 answers
Personally, I'd say that it depends on the question.
Over on that other site, this ban was instituted to avoid opinion-based questions. For instance, suppose you asked:
Is Angular a great framework?
and received the following replies:
Absolutely, i really love it!
No, I hate it!!!
Would that be helpful to you or future visitors? If answers simply voice an opinion without giving any evidence why that opinion is correct, it boils down to a simple popularity contest rather than communicating any knowledge.
That is, I think it is ok to ask for opinions, as long as you also ask for the evidence or rationale that backs them up. Asking about pros and cons is good start for that.
In addition, you might narrow the question further to avoid wall of text issues, and make answers more generally applicable to future visitors.
For instance, in the linked question, I'd have happily answered whether replicating the DB is better than sharing a DB from a security perspective, but that aspect alone, if backed up by proper reasoning and arguments, is likely to result in quite a substantial answer. But "how to adapt the architecture" is a very broad question I could not possibly do justice to within the space and time constraints of a Codidact answer (even if I had all the requirement documents I would need to assess your application's needs).
Therefore, narrowing the question to the particular aspect you are interested in is even more crucial (and possibly more difficult) for architecture questions than for code questions.
All that said, I think a blanket ban would kill many good and valuable questions along with the bad, and declaring such an important subject taboo would leave significant gaps in the knowledge of our visitors. But we should take extra care to ask answerable questions, and take the time to back up our opinions with reasoning and facts.
These questions boil down to "what are do the people who curate the site want to maintain?"
The higher the percentage of people who do that curation (and that includes closing and deleting content that does not meet the desired quality threshold), the softer and squishier the nature of the question that can be handled by that community.
If it is a pool of people that has less time available than the curation demands, the easiest way to resolve this is to close the questions that take more time to deal with. Opinion and recommendation questions are particularly notorious for this type of content - the time it takes to curate them is often disproportionate to the amount of time it takes to write a minimally or less than acceptable answer.
With more people willing to do that curation, it is easier to deal with the poor answers. With fewer people willing to do that curation, it is easier to close the question than deal with those poor answers. With no one doing that curation, you get Yahoo Answers.
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