When You Write How People Want There Is No Guarantee of Success

The practice of sharing questions online has been called social query. One important factor that might contribute to increase the chance to receive answers is to attract others’ attention. To investigate this issue, we asked programmers about what they expect to find in “good” programming questions and end up with a list of sixteen suggestions on how to improve programming questions. However, we found the presence of more “good” characteristics correlates with none of question’s performance attributes (views, time for first response and number of answers). This means that, after being shared, other features not necessarily related with the “question form” have more influence in what happen with your question than the presence of these so called “good” characteristics. The experimental results were presented, providing a useful insight to go further in this investigation on social query.