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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.

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Meta Question templates for guidance

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...

0 answers  ·  posted 3y ago by Alexei‭

#1: Initial revision by user avatar Alexei‭ · 2021-12-28T09:12:20Z (almost 3 years ago)
Question templates for guidance
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](https://docs.github.com/en/communities/using-templates-to-encourage-useful-issues-and-pull-requests/configuring-issue-templates-for-your-repository) 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](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254906/2780791) 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.