Hi everyone. I have recently switched from being an engineering manager to a developer advocate. My focus area will switch from Forge to Jira Software, so I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in this forum to get a better understanding of the issues facing our developer community. I’ve enjoyed this a great deal as I’ve become acquainted with a number of you and it’s an extremely satisfying feeling knowing that I’ve helped unblock certain situations.
Sometimes I come across posts that I find difficult to understand so I figured I would share a couple of thoughts on how to improve the quality of posts in order to yield the best chance for resolution. Rather than trying to provide comprehensive guidelines, I’m limiting my post to my top two suggestions with the hope that others will reply with their suggestions.
So here goes, my top two suggestions for high quality posts:
Use links liberally: It takes a little more effort, but I appreciate it when links to relevant material are included as it reduces ambiguity and helps others research the topic.
Provide context: Some posts are quite brief and require a fair bit of guess work to determine what is happening. Outline your use case and explain what you’ve tried so far.
So now over to you. Does this resonate? Do you have other tips on how we can help each other. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Hope this will reach the right people! But I expect that the ones who read this post (without being linked to it ) probably already know how to ask good questions on here anyway.
Over on the Atlassian Community when you create a post it shows you a few tips next to the editor on what to include in your post. Not sure how that could be realized on here, but something like that would probably reach more people and more importantly new posters who aren’t super familiar with CDAC yet.
Hi @dmorrow does being a ‘Devloper Advocate’ for Jira mean that we can present our requests for prioritisation to you such that you will either be our voice with the internal product managers or introduce us to them? or are we still waiting in the abyss of community forum for community members to vote on our proposed technical features they have no reason to vote on. I guess I am trying to understand the extent of your advocacy or what we can or can’t ask for your help with so that expectations are clear.
Hi @BecciWatson,
I will do my best to represent the needs of the developer community. As you can imagine, there is a broad range of functionality to cover so my approach will be to involve Jira product team members as much as I can.
Regards,
Dugald
That’s great @dmorrow - so can you outline how do we engage with you? Do you have an email address that we can submit our requests in detail (that are not suitable for public forum).
regards
Becci
When I was on the Developer Relations team for the jQuery Project one of the things we would require of users who submitted a bug was to also present a reduced test case. Basically, what is the minimum amount of code required to reproduce the error? This would speed up the process of triaging the error and get a bug fix.
Reduced test cases are something I wish we could require but don’t because of the complexities of being able to set up the context for the problem.
However, with that said I do find myself, and I see others on the team spending a lot of time trying to replicate reported issues. Sometimes, when triaging an issue, I am unable to get it set up to see what the issue is talking about.
Another way to get your issue looked at quickly is to help us by providing a reduced test case that we can easily set up and see what the issue is, obviously if at all possible.
It would also be awesome if certain (announcements) topics can be closed off after a certain time or direct folks to create a new question/topic. (It’s so much nicer/easier for somebody to answer a question if they don’t have to scroll through 3 pages worth of comments to figure out what the original post was about).
As far as answers - code is great. If somebody has a code question - giving sample code (or pointing them towards repos etc) is probably the best approach. Would be kinda neat for there to be a code-snippet-share area for us to all to be able to use…
Glitch is a great way to create minimal example apps that can easily be installed and shared. Here’s a simple, minimal Connect app demonstrating inline dynamic content macros:
I’ve also recently updated Discobot’s message to new members to point to more of these welcome and how-to posts. I’ll update it to include this post, as well.
) probably already know how to ask good questions on here anyway.