QA Hates You

A British band called Grim Reaper:

Lynch Mob.

Sorry, I meant “The Road To Nowhere”:

So, it’s Monday morning. Time for a status meeting. “Are things on schedule?” your project manager asks.

As a public service message, allow me to translate for you:

(Buy this song on Amazon)

Blue Blood Blues by The Dead Weather. What, blues in the title doesn’t make it blues?

Today’s annual tax filing day in the United States, an especial day for the businesspeople amongst us who foolishly went the self-employed route and have a whole bunch of extra forms to fill out for the business and the personal.

Remember, that accountant you pay is just a tax form number developer taking requirements from the customer who is the IRS and whose resulting little stack traces can lead to a vacation for you in beautiful Greenville, Illinois or Leavenworth, Kansas.

If it sounds familiar, it’s because the song appears in the film Pump Up The Volume (you damn kids), but it does not appear on the soundtrack.

A band out of Fort Worth, Texas, gives us a little pep talk. It’s Bring the Flood with “Burn This Place Down.”

As if we needed any encouragement.

Time for another week of law-breaking. Remember, to break the application, you have to break the unwritten assumptions of behavior that everyone in your organization just assumes the user will adhere to.

Hey, how about a little shout out to our leadership?

“Hey, weren’t you part of that leadership when you worked for The Man?”

All right, I meant leaders like me.

QA’s got all the peace we need. Guess what that leaves for everyone else?

(Warning, salty language.)

(Full disclosure: I went to high school with the lead singer of Iron Fist Dillusion, and he never punched me in the eye.)

Ah, “personas.” Little documents designed so that your creative-writing, failing-novelists copywriters can create fictional vignettes to suck man hours and budgets from clients. The whole thing to me smacks of one of the ways overformalization takes a common-sense idea–understanding what your user does and trying to view your software through that prism–and turns it into 16 billable hours plus review meetings.

But if you’re going to have to deal with it, why not do so with appropriate music?

That’s the Harold Faltermeyer theme for the film Fletch.

Now, it’s your duty at the very least to name some of your user personas Dr. Rosenrosen, John Cocktoston, Arnold Babar, and Freida’s Boss.

It’s a clarion call to action this morning courtesy of the band Copper.

I feel a little weird posting this, but this song has a pretty good list of characteristics you need to be QA:

It helps if you turn it up and then sing along in your best Dave Mustaine voice. Of course, singing along with anything in your best Dave Mustaine voice makes anything better, even meeting agendas.

An all-female Iron Maiden tribute band? Why does it take me a decade to catch up with the latest?

This is a loud one. With the F-bomb, so be warned.

MC5 “Kick Out The Jams”

Later redone by Bad Brains for the Pump Up The Volume Soundtrack. If you prefer that version, you have to go to YouTube.

You know and I know that this song describes the personal journey along the timeline, where development says they’ll have it for you on the 24th, but they meant that in hexidecimal, which means they’ll have it available for testing sometime after the go-live date.

This song is The River of Deceit by Mad Season.

The only direction we flow is down.

I know how Taio Cruz feels when he sings Dynamite.

I know, I know, it’s lightweightish for QA music, but I’ve heard it both at the gym and the dojo. So some of the frails dropping 125lb dumbbells and doing sweeping kicks think it’s worth something. Also, it mentions explosives right in the title.

Are you a meek, quiet QA analyst, sitting in the meetings and only listening to the developers thump their chests or, more likely, stroke their Van Dykes as they make excuses?

THEN YOU’RE NOT QA!

QA is Loud ‘n’ Proud, like Pretty Maids!

Albeit most of the time we’re less exclamation pointy. We leave that to marketing.

Look inside yourself, like Crucified Barbara, and see if you share the malady: “My Heart Is Black“.

Caution, f-word.

Rodney Atkins is a country singer, but he sings about the testing phase of any project as though he’s lived it: “If You’re Going Through Hell (Before the Devil Even Knows)”.