# Question procedure (Python group project week)

1. Put a well-formed question in the cohort question channel, tagging the instructor for your group and including the number of the breakout room you are in.
2. Open a question on Progress Tracker.
3. If your question is answered in the channel (either by an instructor or another student), you can
- close the question on Progress Tracker, and
- place a the green checkmark emoji on the thread to indicate that your issue is resolved.
4. Your instructor (or another available instructor) may join your breakout room to help you with your issue. If so, the instructor will close the Progress Tracker question and place a green checkmark emoji on the thread once the issue is resolved.

## Asking good questions
Before you ask your question, check with your teammates. This is a group project, so you should give the whole group a chance to address the blocker before you escalate.

Try to be as specific as possible when asking your question. Giving enough context for your issue will usually involve doing some debugging. If you don't have enough information in your question, your instructor will probably have some follow-up questions before they can give you an answer or hop into the breakout room.

Remember that the goal is to communicate enough information that someone could figure out exactly what is wrong, without seeing the application itself.

Imagine that you're seeing the message with no other context. What sort of information would you need to distinguish this error from all the other errors you've encountered?

Your post should include the following information:
- What feature are you working on?
- What is the functionality like—what part of the process is working, and when does it break?
- What error message(s) are you getting? Check for errors in both the front-end and back-end consoles, and include screenshots of those errors.
- What have you tried so far? This should be specific—don't just say "I added console.log statements and googled the error" try to communicate what you've learned so far through your debugging process. For example, you could say "When I look in the network tab it looks like my request body has all the necessary form data in it, but when I print the `form.data` object on the backend, it says that the username is `None`".

### General questions
Not all questions are related to a specific error or feature. Don't feel like you can only ask questions once you're already getting an error.

If you've already chatted with your teammates, and checked the documentation, but you still have conceptual questions/want to chat about possible approaches to a feature that you have not implemented yet, then you are welcome to put questions like that in the slack channel as well.

Just take the time to figure out what you are asking, and ask it as specifically as you can.