Really. If you stay I'll just hurt your feelings.
Ok. We need to have a frank discussion. We're getting a lot of crappy
questions.
There are a lot of requests for help coming in where the requester is
posting way too little information for any one to possibly help them.
And what's worse, you ask for more info and they reply with a lot of
blather, but don't actually give you the information that we need to
answer their questions.
I've been getting sucked into this myself lately. I feel bad for them. I
want to help. "When you say it doesn't work, are you getting an error
message?" How many times do we need to ask this here? And then they
reply, telling us they tried something else, but it didn't work either,
and they still don't give us an error message! Or they give us just part
of the error message. Or they leave out the stack trace. I guess they
assume that because the stack trace looks like a bunch of gibberish, it
won't help us either. You'd almost think that maybe they don't know
anything about testing software or how to write a bug report.
I learned how to extract a stack trace from a core file 20 years ago so
that I could include it in my bug reports. With Ruby it just gets
printed out. It's just a matter of cut and paste.
"Can we see your script?". "Have you read the FAQ?" "What have you
tried?" -- How many times do we have to ask these questions?
What can we do about it?
1. Stop responding to incomplete requests. Maybe they will repost with
more information. Maybe not. Anyway, just ignore them.
2. Humiliate them and question their right to claim to be a tester if
they can't even report a problem correctly. Make it clear that Watir is
only for testers who have some basic competence.
3. What else?
Bret
--
Bret Pettichord
Lead Developer, Watir, www.watir.com
Blog, www.io.com/~wazmo/blog
Twitter, www.twitter.com/bpettichord
Bret
I totally agree with this. Check out the "Before you ask" section
here: http://wiki.github.com/aslakhellesoy/cucumber/get-in-touch
I also monitor the watir tag at stackoverflow.com. There have been very few queries there, and if they are of slightly higher quality than the average question here, I think that it is because of the barriers to entry there (OpenID, website vs email, etc).
There is another site that I think might make more sense than stackoverflow. http://testing.stackexchange.com is a hosted stackoverflow solution that is specific to testing. It is still young, and does not even have a watir tag yet.
I don’t think that either of these solutions is capable of replacing watir-general at this time.
I am willing to join and contribute to a watir-beginners list.
I also wonder whether some sort of FAQ posted on a regular basis, probably mainly pointing to the wiki/documentation, would help with these problems.
/\/\ark
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Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4556
(20091029) __________ The
message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. __________
Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4557
(20091030) __________ The
message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. __________
Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4558
(20091030) __________ The
message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.
Bret/Z* - I will update the help page today.
Alan
On Nov 3, 2009 3:23 AM, "Željko Filipin" <zeljko....@wa-research.ch> wrote:On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 2:00 AM, br...@pettichord.com <bpett...@gmail.com> wrote: > I guess for now...
I am afraid if we do not push it, that change will not happen. I will add Stack Overflow to support in the next few days, and we will see if it picks up in the following weeks and months.
> I would like to revise the tone of our support page to be more like > the cucumber page. I haven...
I will try to update one of these days, if nobody does it before me. A few people said they would like to help. If you have some time, please do it instead of me. I will do my best to help you with the wiki and all that if you are new. I would rather spend more time in helping somebody learn how to edit wiki than it would take me to edit it myself. I see that as investment in future contributions.
Željko
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are su...
I'm still trying to understand the pros and cons of stack overflow.
You've convinced me to spend more time there. If you personally think it
is better and would prefer using it, you can tell people that that is
the best way to get an answer from you.
Bret
It should include Watir General, IRC, Jira and Stack Overflow. Some of
this stuff is on the community page already. Maybe the community page
could focus a little more on how to help (rather than get help).
I also think you are getting frustrated with some of the questions here.
I suggest that you see if maybe you can just reply less to requests that
annoy you. That's what I'm doing.
Bret
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Željko
--
Thanks guys!
-Tiffany
On Mar 5, 6:28 am, Željko Filipin <zeljko.fili...@wa-research.ch>
wrote: