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Stack Overflow for Teams

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Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#61

Post by colshrapnel »

bluedino wrote: post #54

There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.

SO is bad with search, entirely giving it away for Google to find relevant answers. In a wiki, at least I can follow the structure to find relevant pages, but in the heap of badly phrased questions it will be a pain to find anything relevant.

I love writing documentation too, but from years participating on Stack Overflow I found it most unreliable for the purpose. As I once quipped, "Imagine Wikipedia where there are several hundred articles on the New York city. And one that Google links first is copy-pasted from Encyclopedia Britannica, 1913. And every single day several kids from elementary school start a new one."

SO is torn between essentially ambiguous goals, providing fast on-site answers and being a reusable knowledge base. And it's good with the latter only because of Google. Without Google it will be no better than fast on-site answers on Slack.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#62

Post by Grae »

klenwell wrote: post #43
coryfklein wrote: post #3

I'm excited at the potential this has to organize your own internal information that normally lies stagnant on a wiki (or heaven forbid, email) with no context of whether it's still valid or useful to anyone. It seems like it would be particularly useful for organizations with a distributed work force. On the other hand, so much of StackOverflow's value comes from the economies of scale at hand, and I'm uncertain how…

There was an open source version of Stack Overflow that I set up internally a few years ago at a previous company. I was the only one on the team who actively used it, but even then I found it useful as it was a place to squirrel away these useful little pieces of information you come across and don't know quite what to do with. I ended up coming back to find stuff I'd put there a few times and was starting to refer…

What tool did you use, and would you recommend it? I'm considering that route for project-relevant questions my students have.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#63

Post by gregmac »

tootie wrote: post #56
bluedino wrote: post #54

There's nothing like writing up an Evernote or Wiki article on some feature, process, or how/why something works... and then nobody on the team ever reading. I love writing documentation from time to time. But this helps by getting you to write documentation for only things people are asking about.

I think the win would be in making the answers more findable. Confluence is great for writing documents and laying out pages in a hierarchy, but full-text search is still very hit and miss. Especially when you have 50 projects that all have the same keywords and 49 of them are irrelevant.

Or one person calls it "SomeTitle" and someone else only uses "Some Title" and search has no concept those are the same thing.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#66

Post by heartbreak »

parvenu74 wrote: post #38

Seems like "yet another tool to try to offset the problem of requirements, code, and architectural decisions not being adequately documented for future staff to understand." Sometimes I wonder if software teams should add technical writers embed with developers, architects, QA, and BA assets to actually document All The Things and keep documentation up to date. Yes, that will mean re-writing documentations as people…

I think in most cases "perfect" documentation that is always up to date, fully covers the software project, etc. would be overkill. Most of us aren't writing software for self-driving cars, rocket ships, and surgery suites. We're writing "spreadsheets in the cloud" where requirements change on every conference call, and documentation is JIT because that's all the client can afford.

Private Q&A like this from Stackoverflow would be perfect for my team. It would boost our institutional memory so that when questions are asked they're stored in SO, searchable, maintainable, etc. instead of stored in a Slack archive.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#68

Post by EGreg »

Can_Not wrote: post #58
coryfklein wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That plugin hardly turns Discourse into a full fledged Q&A site. It merely adds a button to mark a specific post as "The Answer". While that may be sufficient for many, there is a reason that StackOverflow has tags, tailored search, reputation, closing, etc. That's what they are selling with that $5 price tag.

It's funny you refute that forum add-on, as it is a good add-on, but it's also just an add-on. A band-aid, not a solution. Too often I see the selected answer "pulled up" to the top, but it's actually just the tail-end of a longer conversation, where the context of the conversation is critical to understanding the answer itself. Not to mention that comment responses (to both answers and the question itself) are inter…

What is a way to reach you?

I thought of making a site like this called https://findmeaning.in

And basically it would consist of claims and evidence linking to other claims — and automatically calculating scores based on votes for claims. The hardest problem would be to prevent sybil attacks, collusion and so on, that could compromise the voting system. Perhaps the score system would need to be based on something entirely different than voting, such as random polling to leverage the wisdom of the crowd (https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/...)

If you are interested, message me greg+hn then the at symbol then qbix.com

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