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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"?

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  • Time to ask this again? I still love this site and the stackoverflow concept. I'm considering learning a bit more selenium just so I can answer more questions. – Alan Dec 22 '12 at 5:10
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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?

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    See also: blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/12/own-your-community-2 :D – Aarthi Dec 21 '11 at 19:49
  • Good link - thanks Aarthi! – testerab Dec 22 '11 at 12:02
  • Okay, this question/answer hasn't had much response, but I don't know if it's because meta has been pretty quiet and folks have stopped reading it. So, I'm going to kick off the new year with my own Good Questions drive, and hope that'll bring folks along with the momentum... – testerab Jan 1 '12 at 18:16
  • My Terminating activities on the STC have also been less the last couple of weeks so the holiday season is part of it. I could start directing some of the techy questions over here – Phil Kirkham Jan 1 '12 at 22:21
  • I've also been crazy-busy with holiday things, then on vacation. Now she's baaaack.... – Kate Paulk♦ Jan 5 '12 at 19:42
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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.

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    Thanks Bruce. I agree about the opinion-based discussions. If you know of specific examples of "smacked down" discussions, it would help to point them out to help draw some boundaries around where we need to change. – user246 Feb 3 '12 at 21:38
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    @user246 Look at the comments on sqa.stackexchange.com/questions/725/… put yourself in the shoes of the new user making their first question. Ask yourself if would ever bother coming back after such a "warm" welcome. – Bruce McLeod Feb 3 '12 at 21:52
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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:

  • Questions older than 60 days will not be migrated
  • Questions with upvoted answers may be harder to migrate
  • The line between topics that should go here and there is unclear to me. Testing is activity that both programmers and testers do, usually at different level. So, both community of Programmers and of SQA might be interested in answers to them.
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  • Thanks for the tip on being able to migrate questions. I didn't know that this could be done. I have been running around stack overflow and answering questions there. I will now keep my eyes open for suitable migration candidates. – SheyMouse Dec 19 '12 at 9:48
  • SheyMouse, you may always subscribe for qa, testing tags to get notified about new candidates for migration :-) – dzieciou Jan 22 '13 at 14:04
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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.

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