Software Tasting --by Geordie Keitt » song

CAST2009: “Feature Creep” song & video

Geordie Keitt — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 19:11:24 +0000

View the post to see the video…

I performed this a month or so ago at CAST2009 in Colorado Springs, where Becky Fiedler recorded it. The intro to this song went, “This song is written from the perspective of a piece of bloatware that used to be sleek and clean.” I did this during a Lightning Talks session, meaning I had to bring it in under 4 minutes. That’s why there’s little time for dramatic pauses…

The Black Box Testing Song

Geordie Keitt — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 03:26:10 +0000

Cem Kaner and James Bach presented a course on Black Box Software Testing that I took circa 2003. I performed this song, Black Box, to wrap up the training. The reference to “underwear and dirty socks”, besides making a pleasant rhyme with “black box”, refers to Cem’s comment that once you get to know a particular developer’s personal developmental hygiene, you can start rummaging around their code looking for their characteristic errors – their dirty laundry, as it were. We spent a little time learning to make test data that is easy to grow to gigantic size and then shrink as needed, and how to recognize when this type of attack might be useful. We also discussed how to turn any statement about the software into a testable requirement, including marketing claims, hence the comment about the Marketing Department, and spent quite a bit of time going over good ways to review specification documents for ambiguity and raise questions that may save confusion later on. Especially if the developers are as frazzled as the ones in the song.

The most important lessons that I learned, though were these: when in doubt, start testing. And notice when you are running across the same bugs as before, stop retracing your own footsteps and try something new. I tried to capture these ideas in the song as well.

I had a lot of fun writing and recording this, and I hope you enjoy it. In case you couldn’t quite tell, it was ripped off from “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Santana. See the page about it on the Audible Stuff blog for more music notes.

I’m Gonna Be a Rapid Tester Someday

Geordie Keitt — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 04:50:53 +0000

Welcome to my testing blog, offering an interesting, perhaps funny, perhaps entertaining, perhaps thoughtful view of my profession of software testing.

To kick this blog off right, I offer you Rapid Tester, a song about a tester at wit’s end about how to test all the stuff that he’s expected to test, and how the Rapid Testing course gave him hope that he could at least do a defensibly reasonable job given what he has to work with.

I this wrote on the occasion of attending my first RST class at James Bach’s Satisfice world headquarters in Front Royal, VA. I’ve edited it slightly since then as my understanding of the material has grown, but the essence remains the same. It borrows pretty much everything from Steve Earle’s beautiful song “Someday”.

Enjoy the song. Did you change your opinion of yourself or your job because of the RST course or others like it?