Testing Your Metal – Drawing Parallels Between Testing Concepts And Heavy Music

Comparisons from unrelated domains are often inspirational. One seemingly unlikely analogy is that of test automation and heavy metal. Though certainly unorthodox, parallels between metal lyrics and automation topics are educational with respect to being responsible in test automation and DevOps.

The phrase “test your mettle” means to test what one is made of, what one is prepared to endure. In testing and automation development, we often endure suboptimal situations and difficult challenges such as unrealistic expectations, resistance to change, and an insistence that automation must come from test cases.

In coping with these challenges, many people find solace in music; listening to and playing music can be a cathartic experience. Music, specifically titles and lyrics, can also be thought-provoking and motivating. Paul Grizzaffi, a self-proclaimed metalhead and rock-a-holic, is one of those people who is greatly affected by music. He not only has experience with testing and automation, he’s quite the aficionado of heavy music. His love of automation, testing, and music inspired the pun in the title.

Join us as Paul takes us on a tour of some impactful lyrics and song titles that frame memorable messages about testing and automation. Among the featured messages: we make our own expectations, automation is not magic, and there are important business aspects related to automation and testing that cannot be ignored.

I’ve spent nearly 25 years as an automation professional; for almost 20 of those years, I’ve been involved in automation architecture. A DevOps culture is largely a culture about getting things done. The organizational makeup is non-traditional, the staff profile is non-traditional, so it only makes sense that our approach to tooling should not be strictly traditional. Additionally. this presentation was well received as a keynote at the 2018 STAREast conference.

From a DevOps standpoint, I’ve also spoken at the annual DevOps Live! conference in Dallas and the 2018 DevOpsDays DFW.