EWT04 - Does it get any shorter?

Last Saturday I took part in EWT session number 4 and what can I say, it was again a worthwhile investment of time.

Our mission was to analyze URL shortening services for three different stakeholders, find possible issues for each of them and report them, including a recommendation at the end ("evaluate").

I started out by opening all the pages in tabs with the target to check the services one by one and not forgetting any. Since during the mission clarification it was mentioned that the users might use several tools and technologies I wanted to check what each of them offered for interfacing with the service. This includes but is not limited to APIs, special mobile phone portals and direct interfaces with Twitter.

On each site I also tried to find traps the user might fall into when using the service. Some sites stated these clearly in the Terms of use others didn't make it that obvious. Two of these issues were Spam and unsolicited advertising, which might have most likely an effect on the heavy Twitter user. A third one was the expiring time for the URLs affecting more likely the student and the online magazine.

In the end I unfortunately didn't complete the mission. I had my notes down on paper but not added as a report in the bugrepository, which in the end means that the customer got no evaluation.

During the next session(s) I will try to work on my electronic note taking.

The last major learning we all had was to ask if a customer is available for questions. When I mentioned that none of us had done this Markus Gärtner - one of the facilitators - said that he had been prepared for this. We missed out on a big chance to clarify and focus our mission.