I've recently looked into creating a QA forum, at a request of a number of team members, where members of the QA
community inside where I work can post questions or blog posts and share them
with others.
The benefits of using something like this over email is that it keeps everything in one place, it stores the questions for ever, so if we have new starters and they have a question they can look at these sites first before sending out an email.
I've suggested OSQA as the question exchange software and we are just going to use a standard wiki for the blog post /information storage.
I got asked how can we ensure that its kept up to date? As it will only really be useful if it is kept up to date.
The simple answer is, that if it's not kept up to date then obviously people aren't using it so it's not that much of an issue if that is the case. If people are using it consistently then it should in theory stay up to date and be an excellent source of information for new starters and older heads!
I will keep you up to date with its success (or lack of) over the next coming months!
The benefits of using something like this over email is that it keeps everything in one place, it stores the questions for ever, so if we have new starters and they have a question they can look at these sites first before sending out an email.
I've suggested OSQA as the question exchange software and we are just going to use a standard wiki for the blog post /information storage.
I got asked how can we ensure that its kept up to date? As it will only really be useful if it is kept up to date.
The simple answer is, that if it's not kept up to date then obviously people aren't using it so it's not that much of an issue if that is the case. If people are using it consistently then it should in theory stay up to date and be an excellent source of information for new starters and older heads!
I will keep you up to date with its success (or lack of) over the next coming months!
If its only for internal issues - then it make sense, if its for general issues - I would direct to one of the community forums.
ReplyDeleteWe also use a network directory of "HowTo", where we keep different internal usage instructions in MS-Word or TXT format - this reduces the need to elaborate common instructions in STD.
Might be easier to save E-Mails as text rather than export into wiki, and probably easier to maintain.
@halperinko - Kobi Halperin
Hey,
DeleteThis will only be for internal issues that are specific to our systems and their architecture. We'll also have a wiki which will have a few things on...
But you're right, for general issues, community forums are definitely the way forward.
I really don't get the point to have QA forum wiki. It will be great to display a sample to understand the idea over this, for the QA members.
ReplyDeleteCurrently we have a wiki but we don't use it much...
We have a wiki and this QA forum. It's effectively an online message board where people can post questions they have about ASOS systems that someone in QA might be able to answer, there's also a karma aspect in that people that give good answers receive upvotes (kind of like reddit). It's better than emailing all of QA to ask a question as often the emails will get lost over time, whereas this way we have a storage for all the questions that might be asked, and the search functionality is pretty good as it makes use of tags etc. If you often have people asking you questions and sometimes it's the same question then I'd highly recommend something like this :)
ReplyDelete