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Stack Overflow for Teams

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Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

I think SO and pure documentation would serve two separate purposes. Sometimes documentation is better for something like an internal library API or related information. But on the other hand, sometimes having a an SO-like place where I can go look up a question related to a quick thing I'm trying to do would be useful. Say I don't remember the process to build the latest version of a Java package and upload it to an…

And here comes the question of maintainability. For the code, we are trying to have a single repository to avoid duplicates and to have just a single place to make changes. That's what a wiki is good for. Whereas for such a dispersed knowledge base it would be hard to keep all these atomic questions up to date.

The front page for Teams boasts it's better than your "stale wikis and lost emails" but in reality there are much more stale answers on SO than anywhere else.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#92

We've been running this in beta for a couple months now, happy to answer questions about it. The SO team has been super helpful during the process.

Roughly how many programmers do you have? What difficult has it been to get people to participate (on either end of the scale)?

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#93

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 ar…

I completely agree with this Analysis.

Having said that, my gut feeling is that SO "Teams" product will succeed in enterprise (& small companies). Managers love if their employees take time to create "Summary pages" from the "Slack and other Chat products". But employees "do not have time" for "Summary pages" and there is no formal structure in 'Slack'. I think this Pages product product provide that 'structure' and a way to measure/monitor by manageres.

> 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

#94

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.

Even if they read, it gets old really fast usually and who have to update it? You. So now you have two problems :)

It's surprising how long code lives. In most organisations I have worked in, companies talk of rewriting legacy code but very few of these projects replace the existing code. There was a front-page article on Cobol here of HN a couple of days ago. Management tends to be interested in new features and I have noticed there is always a reluctance to change something that is already working.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#95
post #58

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…

> React vs VueJS vs Ember could be some side options in a question.

See slant.co, they have taken this approach.

Here's a good example, "What are the best co-op games on Steam?"

https://www.slant.co/topics/1366/~co-op-games-on-steam

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#96

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…

Pushing the need for clear documentation is a battle I find myself frequently fighting. Many devs just aren't sure how to prioritize it or write it, and even worse, many seem to have absorbed the idea that code should be self documenting and that comments are a code smell. Whoever is responsible for the idea that comments are code smell deserves to receive all future vitriolic emails from anyone who ever stumbles int…

Whoever thinks comments are a code smell has probably stumbled into a nest of documented code where the documentation was out of date and didn't refer to the latest code in question, causing intense confusion. Comments can certainly be helpful but there is nothing to guarantee that they will be up to date or even useful.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/05/03/announcing-stack-o... In his post here, he kind of directly writes that SO is not like a wiki. > But you know what does work? A Q&A system. Like Stack Overflow. > Why? Because unlike wikis, you don’t write documentation in the hopes that one day it might help someone. "Because unlike wikis.."

In the exact quote you gave, he says that SO is different from "wikis" in that the question is written before the answer.

When most people think "wiki", seeing answers before questions is certainly a common characteristic they could assign to the concept, but it's not what makes it a "wiki".

I could design a wiki that was text-only and say, "unlike wikis, we don't present photos", but that wouldn't make it not-a-wiki.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#98
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its creator would disagree with you. [1] [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/12/28/stack-overflow-is-...

Stack overflow was originally more like a wiki, with everything editable. Over time things got more immutable and marking questions as "community wiki" by default started being discouraged.

An question/answer doesn't have to be marked "community wiki" for you to edit it.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#99
I think it's a mistake to look at this from the perspective of software developers. It's called "Teams" because it's for teams - which can be anything from software developers to facilities maintenance people. It's for teams that have questions (and answers), not for software developers who have questions (and answers).

By way of experience with this, we run an internally written Stack Overflow clone of sorts for a large industrial printing product we make. It's meant for people in our organization who have questions and are looking for answers. And as such, there are no "wrong" questions.

For example, someone might ask, "I'm traveling to the San Diego site - what's the most convenient hotel to stay at?", and create a new tag for "san-diego", "recommendations", and "hotels". Or they might post about "Top-of-form mark detected too close to the previous frame" using tags like "print-engine" and "top-of-form".

For us, both types of questions are very valid and "on topic" questions to post in our internal stack.

When we first launched our stack, we imagined it as being a kind of "crowd sourced internal knowledge capture" tool. But a real evolution in our thinking has occurred, and we've found that most people use it to post questions and answers at the same time. In other words, they've solved a problem and want to share the solution. And SO's "question/problem statement" followed by "answer/solution" template and framework makes it very easy for them to share this knowledge. Contrast with a wiki for example, where they are presented with a blank page and told to "document this issue".

One feature we are considering is the idea of wizards for certain types of posts. For example, if you are posting an answer about equipment work that requires opening electrical panels, we probably should have a warning about only doing this if you are certified for it. So the wizard idea might say, "Is this a solution that relates to electrical safety?" Checking yes automatically appends some boilerplate text with a caution about electrical certification.

We've also found that the voting up/down feature isn't that useful. People just don't do that voting stuff, nor do they really care about their reputation. What we are going to do is replace the vote system with a simple, "Did this answer help you?" type approach. It's literally the same thing, but with a different way of asking it. Because we don't actually do "down" votes, a "Yes" is a vote up, and a "No" prompts the user to post a comment explaining why it didn't help them, assuming it was what they were looking for. Was the answer not clear? Was it wrong? Did it not work? Is the information out of date? This kind of feedback (via comments) will help answer authors evolve their content to be better.

Re: Stack Overflow for Teams

#100
Slightly offtopic, I recently looked at all top free internet websites/services that I use and wondered which of them I would miss if advertising dollars dry up. For me, it turned out to be stackoverflow and Google. I truly hope stackoverflow is a profitable venture at this point. I hope they have been trying various avenues to make money but no o no one has any info on profitability. Job ads pay well, but there is fierce competition there.
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