I’m sure we have all gotten stuck on a problem or an error that we just can’t quite seem to figure out. Today, we naturally flock to our favorite search engine, type in our question, and out comes our answer. However, what happens when the question you are asking doesn’t have an answer to it or even worse it has never been asked before, well you can either sit there for hours staring at your computer bashing your fingers at every possible solution you can think of or… you could ask it on a forum site like StackOverflow where there are thousands of people who may have experienced or even know how to fix the problem you are having. Although, with this vast knowledge may also come with scrutiny if you ask questions the “wrong” way. But, you shouldn’t be afraid of asking questions and asking questions the right way will undoubtedly save you time by having your question responded to quickly and with quality answers.
Good questions come in all lengths and sizes, so it can be difficult to know how to ask yours. Thankfully, we have Eric Steven Raymond’s article “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way”, which is all about how to ask “good” questions on the internet, so you will never have to feel afraid if you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to ask a question on a forum. The article also covers what to do before even asking your question and what to do when it comes time to post your question.
Essentially, before you ask your amazing, beautiful question about your strenuous, difficult problem, you should always try and ask your peers, search the web, read the documentation, experiment to find a solution, or go on FAQs. These are all things that you can do before you even decide to ask your question. If you have exhausted all your resources, then and only then, can you ask your question.
Asking your question is pretty simple. However, you should keep some DO NOTS in mind when asking your question. You should never post your question to a forum where it is off topic, post an elementary question to a forum with advanced tech questions, and vice-versa, do not cross-post, and do not personally email strangers to get your question answered. Also, always remember to title your question with a meaningful title. It’s typically the first thing that most people responding to your question will look at, so it’s important it does not contain any unnecessary information that may lead to other developers scrolling past your question.
We have talked a lot about how to ask a good question, but let’s look at what a good question looks like. The question is about a developer who is getting an error trying to get his maven plugins to work. He links what he has tried and looked at with his pom.xml file along with the IDE and version he is using and a snippet of the error he is getting. To top it off, he has a well-worded header (“How to solve plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration for Spring Data Maven builds”) that explicitly states what he needs help solving. This question has not violated any of our do nots and in return he has gotten high quality answers from multiple developers.
You can learn more about the issue here.
Now let’s look at a bad question. This question has violated our DO NOTS and has even gone under community scrutiny in the form of dislikes. This question is from a user who wants to resolve an error that he is getting from trying to start Maven. Although we can see that he has provided us with information about the IDE and version he is using, along with the stacktrace (after being asked by a developer) and what he has tried, he has not provided us with any details about his pom.xml file, so other developers are having trouble trying to help him. In addition, we can see that their header is just them saying that they are getting a Tomcat error, which does not provide us with any information about the problem he is facing. This leads to answers like the one posted not getting very many responses and the quality of the response does not really help the original poster.
You can learn more about the issue here.
Asking questions on the internet can sometimes feel like a daunting task for some. After all, no one enjoys being called out or negatively criticized for asking a question. Knowing how to effectively communicate with fellow developers will drastically help in the quality of answers that you receive. This is just one of the many skills that students and developers have to learn in order to become a more successful software developer.