As how Johnson stated, “Communication is one of the most important software engineering skills to develop,” and being able to ask effective questions is important in receiving new information from someone else. A good question will be more likely to get a good answer. So then, are there dumb questions? To how I have been taught, the answer is no. However, there is always a smarter way to ask a question. Eric Raymond’s guide is a great way to determine if your question is a good one to ask.
Example of a dumb question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1919787/how-do-i-fix-this-stack-overflow-error
Here, we have someone requesting “help” for his sudoku solver. The reason I put help in quotes is because he doesn’t know what solution he’s asking for. While he does mention StackOverflowError, he does not provide the details such as which line creates the error. Also, there is Java documantations that will explain StackOverflowError. Another mistake is that he attempts to answer his own problem with rather silly solutions. I quote, “…my method doesn’t know how to turn around and fix its mistakes.” I may be mocking the author of this post but, it does seem like he was using StackOverflow to solve his homework for him. The top answer was similar to my response.
Example of smart question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15976333/a-overflow-caused-by-recursive-function
A student is taking a course in C++ and he says he is starting to learn about recursive functions. He then states that his code causes a stack overflow when he gives the parameter of 4793, but gives no error with a parameter of 4792. So the reason why I think this is a good question is that I can specifically see what problem he is having and how to recreate the problem. He shows just enough code and said enough information for a reader to determine his problem.