Shakespeare by AI and Ady Stokes

This was done for TestBash 2024 99-second-talks. Since day 1 was AI-themed, I immediately thought of Shakespeare and speeches / soliloquies in his plays. I had AI write one and did one myself. Which do you like best? Links to the 99-second videos are below, with times for my performance. PS. I don't apologise for going over the top. That's my best Shakespearean impression, and I'm happy with it. 

Macbeth's Act 5, Scene 5 ("Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow") as a tester. Written by AI. 

 

Testing, and testing, and testing 

 

Creeps in this petty place from sprint to sprint,  

To the last release of recorded time;  

And all our past builds have led fools the way  

To buggy death. Out, out, brief patch!  

Software's but a walking shadow, a poor app  

That struts and frets its bugs in live,  

And then is heard no more: it is a tale  

Told by a tester, full of logs and crashes,  

Signifying nothing.  

 

Our code was sound—so we believed—yet here  

We stand again, surrounded by defects  

That mock our careful plans. Each fix, a flaw  

Awaiting to be found in deeper layers  

Of this cursed stack. 

 

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 (as a tester). Written by me and not AI. 

 

To test, or not to test, that is the question:  

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer  

The bugs and crashes of outrageous software,  

Or to take arms against a sea of defects,  

 

And by debugging, end them. To test, to deep dive—  

No more. And by a test to say we end  

The headaches, and the thousand natural flaws  

That code is there and 'tis complicated  

Devoutly to be pushed. 

 

To test, to dive 

To dive, perchance to catch a bug. 

Ay, there's the rub,  

For in that depth of testing, what bugs may come,  

When we have shuffled through this code of errors,  

Must give us pause. There's the respect  

That makes disaster of so long a release.  

 

For who would bear the silent, creeping bugs,  

The crashes, hangs, and lagging user screens,  

The poor reviews, the endless customer complaints,  

The scorn of stakeholders, the missed deadlines,  

When we ourselves might this quietus make  

With a clean test suite?

Day 1 99-second-talks: I'm on at 8:18
Day 2 99-second-talks: I'm on at 23:19