In How to ask questions the smart way, Eric Raymond provides guidelines for effective interaction with the open source community. If you haven’t yet read this essay, please do so before proceeding.
For this experience, you will use StackOverflow to provide examples of the positive outcomes that can potentially occur when users follow the guidelines, and the negative outcomes that can potentially occur when users don’t.
First, search StackOverflow for a question submitted by a user that demonstrates the “smart way”. Such a question should follow the precepts established by Raymond. In addition, the answers provided by the community should demonstrate that asking a question the smart way leads to both efficient and effective help.
Next, you will search for a question submitted by a different user that demonstrates the “not smart way”. In other words, this question violates the principles established by Raymond. In addition, the answers provided by the community should demonstrate that asking a question in a “not smart” way does not lead to both effective and efficient help
The goal of this exercise is not to “prove” that asking questions the smart way is always better (although it would be quite interesting to design an empirical study using StackOverflow to actually gather data on whether “smart” questions do indeed, on average, lead to more effective and efficient answers). Instead, the goal of this exercise is to help you form a deeper understanding of what constitutes “smart” and “not smart” questions so that you are more likely to ask smart ones in the future.
Write a technical essay that discusses what you found, how the chosen questions fulfill (or not) the precepts for smart questions, how the responses reflect the smartness (or lack thereof), and the insights you gained as a result of this experience.
By the date and time indicated on the Schedule page, send johnson@hawaii.edu an email with a link to your technical essay. Your URL should start with “http:” so that my mailer will recognize it as an URL and make it clickable.
Note: the subject line must be [ICS 314: E11]. If the subject line is different, then I might not see the email and you might not get credit for this assignment.