The Programming Pebble

In my professional life as a programmer, I found myself often asking the same questions of people seeking support. Since we have a support department, I thought these questions should already have been asked, and when they do need to escalate the problem to me, they should include all the info I'm going to ask them for. It struck me that if I could encode my technique for narrowing down the problem and locating relevant information, it could save me time.

Robopebble was written to do just that. It is a general purpose, web-editable "Expert system". An expert system is an AI technique which asks questions designed to diagnose a fault or condition. With Robopebble, you can teach it new questions to ask at any point, or add new options.

Robopebble is built on MySQL (Tested with various versions upto 4.1.x).

Things still to do

Question and answers trail If the user is unable to resolve their problems by themselves with Robopebble, it would be useful to be able to present a page at the end with a summary of which questions they've been asked, and what their answers were, so that they can copy & paste that into the problem report email.

Question tree summary It might be useful to have a diagram of the current questions/answers tree, so that a knowledgable person can check that everything looks correct, and that people haven't added misleading info.

Recent changes

robopebble-0.97 2006-05-16

Fixed several typos. Updated TinyMCE to the latest version.

robopebble-0.96 2005-11-04

Some improvements thanks to Tony Ayre: TinyMCE integration (improved entry editing), uploads (for screenshots etc) and a better install procedure.

robopebble-0.9 2003-03-03

New feature: Export as a static set of pages for offline use. This allows a non-editable snapshot of the database to be put on engineers laptops and taken to sites.

Fix: Better slash/quote handling Should now work regardless of the magic_quotes_gpc setting in your php.ini!

Robopebble vs the FAQ

I don't see Robopebble as competition to the traditional FAQ. FAQs are for people who know which question to ask. Robopebble is for when the developer/support person is almost certainly going to have to try to extract more information from the person seeking help after their initial question. If people ask "How do I enable fooing?" and you answer "Go to Options, tick 'foo'" a lot, then add it to your FAQ. If people say "Your product doesn't work!", and you then play 20 questions trying to work out what they expect it to do that it doesn't, then let Robopebble ask them for you.

Tips for a good Robopebble question tree

Try to ensure each question breaks the problem into evenly sized lumps. If you have a balanced tree, you can home in on the problem in the fewest possible questions. An unbalanced tree will just ask if it's each problem it knows about until it hits one - you can make it so that it doesn't ask irrelevant questions, so use that.