Why are smart questions important for software engineers? Smart questions are important to software engineers because engineers need to be able to communicate. Especially if a software engineer is working on a team, that engineer not only needs to know how to program well but also to communicate well. Being on a team means that one person is not going to be writing the whole code but a whole group of people will be writing different parts of ONE program. If a software engineer doesn’t ask smart questions they may end up stalling the completion of the program or worse, creating code that doesn’t work with the rest of the team’s because they didn’t ask a smart question and were not able to understand what they needed to do.
Searching Stackoverflow, I found a “smart” question and a “not smart” question.
The chosen “smart” question fulfills many of the precepts that Eric Raymond wrote down in his web log. The person asking the question is precise, he is able to provide code that reproduces the inquiry, and the symptoms provided are clearly stated. The symptoms provided are not his guesses. His question is explicit, he provides what he was doing and then is able to ask his question so that readers can clearly understand what answer he is looking for. The snippet of code he provided is short enough that readers are not overwhelmed and start to lose interest in the question.
The chosen “not smart” question does not fulfill the precept regarding the question being precise and informative. The writer does not describe the research or diagnostic steps taken before posting the question. The writer did present the goal in which he wanted an answer but he did not take any steps on his own to learn more about that goal before going into the forum with his question. The question does not fulfill the precept that his question must be explicit.
The responses for the “smart” question is very positive. Through his “smart” questioning he was able to get a very detailed answer. The writers who answered were very helpful and also curious regarding his questions, they even asked questions of their own. The person who wrote the question answered back intelligently.
The response for the “not smart” question is exactly what Eric Raymond wrote people would reply with. Some writers wrote that he needed to do more research and a few told him to STFW. Raymond is very spot on with these predictions.
I feel that I’ve bettered my questioning methods, especially online. Questions I will be asking in the future will be thought out more. I won’t hastily post a question without doing more research on the subject. I think that is the main takeaway from this reading. I will exhaust my resources, which would be hard to do with the internet, before finally asking for help.