How smart questions affect software engineers?
24 Jan 2019how smart questions affect software engineers?
I would like to start with saying how important to know about the difference smart questions and bad questions. Maybe you don’t like to question at all because you are too shy or want to waste your time on the questions. However, since you were very young, you have grown up with bunch of questions whether you wanted or not. Can you imagine a world without questioning? It would be tragic living in the world because without questioning, you can’t get the answer for the question and you will stay unknowledgeable. Smart questions come from deep thought and if you keep questioning repeatedly and consistently, it would eventually make us understand the question and result in better questions. The results from repeated smart questions end up developing myself. Smart questions in software engineering are pretty much like the real life. Smart questions will prompt the users on forums like stackoverflow.com to answer the smart way.
Avoiding stupid questioning
Almost everyone will not be able to give you a correct answer that you want for your question, if you don’t tell them what you exactly expect them for the answer. To get right answers from them on the forums like stackoverflow.com, you should follow some rules.
Be aware of what you want. You must know what you want before you ask a question. Your uncertain goal of knowing about your questions would cause to get vague answers for your question. Once you know exactly what kind of questions you want, you can give the users on the forums details and context, and then they can also give you back the useful detailed answer for your question.
Search for your answer on internet before you ask. You don’t want to waste of your time just waiting for someone to answer your question that some people have asked already on the internet. It would save your time waiting for your answer and give you extra time working on another questions. There are over 100 sites you can search on, so the effective way to find your answer for your question is to find anything related to your answer and narrow down the results from searched answers. For other people who might look for answer that you wanted, you should make it easy to reply and clear how your question is relevant to other people that just you.
Be specific. If you only want the answer yes or no for your question, you will not completely understand the concept of your question. To avoid this situation, you should focus on questions with “who”, “why”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “how”. Those questions would give you more useful information. For instance, if you are stuck in a problem, you should notify “what” exactly symptoms the problem has, and “when” it happened so that users can clearly and closely look into some points that they think that that problem has occurred.
Examples
This example is a bad question because the question is not informative enough to give a correct answer and he or she didn’t try and understand before asking a question. The questioner didn’t also provide a vendor’s distribution and release level, so those who tried to answer for the question had a difficult figuring out what is wrong with it.
This example is a smart question because he searched for the problem he got before asking question and showed us how much efforts put in by showing some code that he tried but failed. He also doesn’t just want answer for his question, and he wants to know why it is wrong.