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Proposal: DevOps

DevOps themes sit at the meeting point of many disciplines, and we can foresee that a DevOps Q&A site is likely to attract a lot of questions which could also be good fits on Server Fault, Stack Overflow, or Virtualization, Cloud, and Grid Computing or some other site on the SE network.

Some persons expressed off-site concerns about the creation of a new SE site, where questions will be off-topic, voted to close without a word of explanation and the like. This is why I trigger the discussion, so that people committed in the creation of a new SE community can discuss how we want to handle the type of questions mentioned above.

As a discussion starter, let me recall one important principle of the SE network: users are invited to be welcoming and patient, which tells us that user behaviours leading to the concerns reported should not be seen as normal.

As a community, how do we ensure that we are welcoming and benevolent while taking care of on-topicness of questions asked? History shows that some SE communities seem to have lost that direction from their compass. How are we going to act?

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  • I like the idea of pointing questioners to other SE sites where the question would be more on topic. The question closed message could use wording akin to "You might find better answers at SO." It might even suggest tags at that site.
    – Stephen C
    Feb 15, 2017 at 4:50

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While a question is on topic here or not would be quite easy to guess, for how I see it it would be question about near anything as long as it's related to one of:

  • Automation/orchestration in a wide range (all tools, from MesoSphere/Consul to .cmd files IMHO)
  • Continuous integration
  • Integration testing
  • Unit testing of automation scripts
  • Configuration management

Out of this, it will probably best suited to one StackOverflow, SuperUser, etc.

In fact the on-topic here are all the questions on a razor blade on StackOverflow or SuperUser as they involve programming and computer management (mainly server, but I won't block workstations questions)

A question being off topic while fulfilling one of the above points would have a few chance of being on topic elsewhere.

As stated on those meta comments here and here the main concern is how the migration could take place (from SO to Devops and other way around) and the fragmentation around the community members on SO and DevOps (less time for each).

Obviously the migration is an important part to be welcoming, but the rules haves to be clear about what is on and off topic with as few ambiguity/subjectivity as possible to keep a coherent moderation along all.

As a chef tag follower, there's a lot of questions off-topic for SO, plenty living on a razor blade, and very few at end on-topic for SO. A more specialized site with a different aim could help answer those question instead of just closing them as I really don't see where to send them actually.

In a wider range it could make a better Q/A sources for questions about "system administration/infrastructure as code" which usually are half-way on SO and SU without being really on topic on both.

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