Date: 6th January 2010
Time: 15:30 – 18:00 GMT
Websites Tested:
Mission:
You are contracted by three stakeholders to evaluate URL shortening services. The stakeholders are
- a heavy twitter user tweeting a lot of internet references over the day
- a university student wanting to share stuff from his homework/courses over the internet with his fellow students
- an online magazine publisher for referencing further readings on the internet
The pre-selection already has taking place and the most promising products are
Evaluate the products for their applicability for the given users and report any problems the mentioned stakeholders may run into.
Testers: Jaswinder Kaur Nagi, Vivek Joglekar, Phil Kirkham, Markus Deibel, Ajay Balamurugadas, Anna Baik, Markus Gärtner
Anna Baik and Markus Gärtner facilitated the discussion afterwards, asking each tester about their experiences.
Phil Kirkham started the discussion afterwards. At first he didn’t know where to start, and realized after going to all the services that their offerings had different things that would appeal to the different stakeholders. So, for him it was more of a usability testing session than a bug finding one. The diversity of the users in the mission showed how hard testing can be when taking all stakeholders into account. He got over this hurdle by interacting with the products and seeing opportunities for each stakeholder in it. Getting information directly from the products under test helped a big deal. Knowing the stakeholders and their needs from the product helps to direct the testing efforts appropriately.
Jaswinder Kaur Nagi continued the discussion. Among the other more experienced testers she felt a bit under pressure. She started to dive into the products and found some bugs. She thinks she needs to learn a lot. At Weekend Testing she can do something different and learn.
Ajay Balamurugadas explained that he wanted to stay out of any traps and misunderstandings. He paid some attention to the question from the participants; that helped. He explained that he had just read a report comparing different URL shorteners. Personal experience with the URL shortening services helped him get the mission started. In addition to that experience with the constraints of these services helped him generate new ideas. One example is the life span of the generated URLs, which are restricted on some services, on others they will work forever. Ajay had two major lessons:
- Dedicate time for testing
- Practice time-boxed testing
Markus Deibel finished the discussion part. He started by suggesting a possible reason for a failure Ajay had reported. Discussion and some more testing followed, before Markus returned to his report. Over the course of the session Markus got distracted and ended up with some notes on paper and the need to type it into the bug repository. That showed him that time management for testing and reporting on the testing is crucial. Last, Markus noticed that none of the participants took the opportunity to ask stakeholder questions to the session leaders. This may have ended up in assumptions on the usage of the tools under test.
The chat transcript may be inspected online.
Pradeep Soundararajan is a well known tester in the Testing World. Pradeep is a Test Consultant, Coach, Speaker and Mentor to many testers across the world. He is also the Author of 
Good Mission. I must say I missed this session inspite of trying to make it this time. Setting realistic missions as in this helps testers realise how to tweak in our testing and efforts to provide information to the stakeholders directly. This mission had a psychological effect on me. I didn’t know for a second what information should I give for the stakeholders and how?
I tested this morning for the above session and mission. I tried a little different approach. I used the 3 stakeholder groups and came up with ideas about features that mattered the most to each group (heavy twitter user, university student and magazine publisher). Based on those features, I checked each URL shortening service if they provided/supported that feature. In the end, I got a fairly good feature list which made it easy for me to summarize which one would be good to go with.
What I failed to do was summarize like Philk did (Awesome job Philk). It is important to be able to report the information in a format acceptable, clear and precise to the stakeholders/decision makers. Else, it would be as good as nothing.
I really really liked the way Philk summarised. Thank you Philk. You showed me a new way to report information to the stakeholders. Ajay’s approach to search through available information would have speeded up my testing. It didn’t strike me at the time (Need to remember that Google is all ready to help always). I also enjoyed the debrief session (again, felt bad that I didn’t make it to such a wonderful session).
Thank you very much EWT 04. It’s been great to read the session report,bug reports and the chat transcript. I will try to make it next time
Regards,
Parimala Shankaraiah
Markus,
nice summary, however I was expecting one important thing that wasn’t mentioned – was the mission achieved?
I find this to be one of the complaints I get from PM’s saying that whatever was done is all good and fine but “have you answered my question?”
It would be interesting to see if all testers have a recommendation for each of the three stakeholders; do all testers agree in their recommendation? If not, can they formulate why they disagree?
You might have covered all of that in your actual discussion but since I didn’t take part I don’t know that.
Thanks,
Thomas
Finally I get to answer your questions, Thomas.
So, I think there has been some agreement on the applicability of the shorteners among the five available.
The discussion log entry is up on bug repository. It’s a bunch of pages, but maybe worthwhile to read. If I remember back correctly, we did not discuss it directly. Personally, I liked Phil’s report and the one from Ajay, though it doesn’t give a clear recommendation or summary statement. Since the nature of the feedback is different (clear recommendation vs. lists of features and drawbacks), I don’t dare to compare them. Ajay’s write-up leaves a lot of room for the particular user to decide if he likes the functions or not. Reminded me on articles from the German c’t magazine, where they do something similar.
To get a more condensed view, some more information from Jassi and Markus Deibel would be helpful. Maybe we should continue this discussion on the forums here.