WT53 - Digging into eBay

It's been a week since WT53 took place. I wouldn't wait that long to write a test report, but reflecting a bit on the experience is good for a write up like this, I guess.

I hadn't taken part in a WT session for about nine months, and was anxious to get back into full testing mode and even more so, since the session was lead by Jon Bach- Currently working as lead in eBay's test team.

A side effect was that I got the chance to check out, how working on a 9" netbook would influence my effectiveness, but more to that in the summary.

The missions for the hour of testing which revolved around the search functionality of ebay were small but plenty.

a) Which search string returns the most items?
b) What is the most bizzare thing that you can find? - Highly subjective!
c) What's the most expensive item on ebay?
d) Can you find a "Whack", a search string that returns one item?

I started out with mission a) thinking along the terms of strings, (mis-)leading to use text values only.
My thinking sprang to using as small a number of characters as possible, covering the most words at the same time. Thus the starting point was the letter e, which directly gave me the following message:

Your query matches a large number of items. Please try searching within one of our categories.

This was also found by several other people, using different strings. The combined investigation drew out the idea that the limit might be somwhere around 21.000.000 results

Since after ten minutes I hadn't reached a value higher than 2.000.000 probably I switched to mission c).
That mission turned out to be an eyeopener on what people are actually selling on eBay.
Here is a small assortment of what I found along with the search term I used:
- most expensive
- A quite expensive T-Shirt
- ship
- A tanker ship
- plane
- A DC-6B plane (that is NOT a model )

Further more I had, cranes, houses and even an X-Ray telescope.

I continued with mission b). SInce bizarre is a highly subjective description I started with the search word 'bizarre' taking into account the sellers own impression of the object. Amongst others I got real human x-rays and even though I didn't find a real shrink-head the next best thing were dried apple head dolls.

At this point I had about ten minutes left to go for a "whack" but gave up after a few minutes, taking the time to follow what was going on in the chat.


The hour of discussion was quite interesting. Discussing the approach for finding the most items turned out be be quite interesting. One tester used the search term '00*' since the basic search also includes a check against the auction ID. That showed a blind spot in my approach. Sure I had used the search for an item ID myself before, but just didn't remember it.

For the other approaches, everyone seemed to work along their lines of thought, refining the search strings based on some idea derived from the previous one.

Short before the end Jon described this technique with using several small mission, giving each a timeframe of about five to ten minutes as "Open Book Testing" (I don't have the transcript yet but I think he mentioned a blog post on it). In addition to his use, two testers saw this is a good way to assess testers in job interviews.


As for myself, it felt good to get back into testing mode again and be reminded that there is always a second, third or fourth point of view on the work that I deliver as developer. Working with a 9" netook for twon straight, however is not fun. Straining for the eyes and also typing is not easy. I'd not reccomend it for professional use.