Date: Saturday, April 23, 2011
Time: 15:00 UTC
Participants: Anna Baik, Ben Simo, David Vydra, Kristjan Uba, Lalitkumar Bhamare, Michael Larsen, Narasimha Reddy, Nitin Purswani, Petteri Lyytinen, Santhosh S Tuppad and Eusebiu Blindu (as host)
The mission was “Boundary Testing for Skype Chat” with focus on the chat message
It was split into five parts:
1) What are the max, minimum lengths of a visible chat message?
2) What are the limits preserved in a history chat?
3) Are the limits affected by the content of a message (like if I have an emoticon do I have less space for a message)
4) Are there any effects on the application for some chat size messages?
5) Did you noticed any particular behavior worth mentioning?
Anyone could have picked and changed the mission during the first hour.
The discussion turned in the beginning to the legal aspects of this mission, whether or not its OK to “stretch” the limits of an application like Skype. Truth being told, we need to be careful with this part in the areas we test, and maybe analyze the legislation regarding it. But I think also we should not worry too much for everything.
We had used perlclip for this mission (although it wasn’t mandatory) to ease our test data. We went through some aspects like approach, curiosity, ideas about back-end of the application etc…
I think we found some issues in the product and hope the participants won ideas in approach, tools, views and stuff that can help them do a better job in this field.
Anyone can read the transcript here
After the session some side effects were reported like old messages poping out, so don’t do this at home ! 🙂
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Looking back, I believe I made too big a deal of my concerns and and to strongly implied answers to my questions about what was proper testing of the Skype message limits.
Rather than being fearful of overstepping bounds of authorized and reasonable use, it would have been better for me to review the terms of service and do some reasonably safe exploration to better understand and assess the level of aggressiveness I am comfortable taking with my testing.
The TOS (which I have since perused) do not appear to explicitly forbid the type of testing done in this session. The limit (as we believe we’ve discovered it to be) was within the bounds of what I believe reasonable users of the system are likely to try.