Things started out here on a promising note, but the flow of questions and answers seems to have slowed considerably.
Are we just dying a slow death?
Is there something to be done about that, or is that "just the way it is"?
Things started out here on a promising note, but the flow of questions and answers seems to have slowed considerably.
Are we just dying a slow death?
Is there something to be done about that, or is that "just the way it is"?
Good question!
I note that, while the question rate is not looking healthy, in terms of users, number of questions answered, and other stats, we are getting there (number of daily visits, for instance, seems to have been climbing steadily if I recall correctly, it was a lot lower than it is now): http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/2241/software-quality-assurance-testing
At this point in time, I'm inclined to suggest the slowdown may be partly due to the impending holiday period - however, I think that overall, we could do with a bit of a kick in the pants to get the site moving again. We have enough users now that we ought to be able to sustain more questions/answers without the quality dropping off.
So what can we do about that? Well, there are some suggestions here for stuff that's worked pretty well for other sites: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/07/does-this-site-have-a-chance-of-succeeding/
I like the idea of picking an event to have a Good Questions drive: new year is coming up, what do you think of the idea of focusing on that? Would selecting a particular theme help people?
I can only speak for myself, but I haven't actively been using the site for a while. A huge death march project, A holiday in spain and the Christmas period were what did it for me.
I have noticed a number of things. If you look at SQA discussions in linked in forums, they are a lot more opinion based that the type of discussions that we have here.
I also spoke to someone who started using this site, and then felt that they go "Smacked down" for not working with the site the way the community expected, simply to walk away never to return.
So maybe, we need to look how we can tweak the way the site works to be a bit "softer" to bring users to offer opinions on what is largely a developing field.
One way to attract more people here would be to flag posts about testing on Programmers Stack Exchange for migration here.
There's really a number of them there, see my list.
There's a number of things to consider, however:
qa
, testing
tags to get notified about new candidates for migration :-)
– dzieciou
Jan 22 '13 at 14:04
As someone who spends a fair amount of the day job dealing with matters relating to ISO12207
(etc), and is a member of the MISRA-C
committee I found my way here, thanks to @dzieciou's thread on Meta.SO.SE - I hadn't come across the site previously :(
I guess part of the problem here, is that this site is pretty much covered by other (existing) SE sites, so I think this one needs to work harder to get itself known, and to attract potential contributors who may only visit one-or-two other SE sites.