“Socratic questioning” implies only a collegial relationship. If you cannot walk over to a colleague and ask them questions about their work without them getting offended, your office politics are extremely unhealthy.
Or else you are probably wearing an expression of disapproval when you ask them these questions. If you go in with an honest “I want to learn and understand” stance, normal people will generally be happy to answer.
Of course you can and should always ask your colleagues questions in order to understand their point of view and way of thinking.
But that's not what Socratic questioning is. It is specifically when you ask pointed questions, pretending that you don't know the answer already, in order to make the student work out the line of thinking herself, or perhaps force her to flesh out her thinking more completely.
It's more about making the askee think than transferring information. As such, trying to mask that behind "I'm just asking questions" is rude.
You can go into a session like this with your mind made up and still legitimately ask these questions. This questioning should hopefully show the other party why they are wrong or show you why they are correct. Either is a great outcome and the questions are the same either way.
I have the understanding from experience that people will always give a reason for doing something that I could not imagine.
So 1st, make questions, understand what is the objective with that code you see on screen.
2nd, make more questions too see if other use cases were considered.
3rd, there are best practices, literature that provide a common way of working, discuss how to apply this.
There are no ways of understanding without making questions.
On this specific case, besides the lack of OO design knowledge, there were also a misunderstand on the page object pattern , how web apps are build and what is the web app and what is part of the browser.
And this is why I also talk with my team on my ideas to develop something before or while developing it. It should not be a surprise, no matter how nice and commented the code is.
Or else you are probably wearing an expression of disapproval when you ask them these questions. If you go in with an honest “I want to learn and understand” stance, normal people will generally be happy to answer.
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