Local Man Writes Automation Framework, Framework Writes Resignation Letter
An article about Shalva "Shako" Beridze · Filed under: Career, Attempted · QA & Automation
In the spring of an unspecified year, Shalva “Shako” Beridze — manual QA engineer, self-declared ping pong champion, and a man with a documented history of announcing large plans on Tuesdays — sat down to write the automation framework that would end his manual testing career forever.1
Surprising everyone, he got quite far.
The framework had a folder structure. It had a configuration file. It had a README.md that opened with the sentence “This framework is designed to be simple.”[citation needed]
The incident
There are differing versions of what happened next. The only point of agreement is that on the fourth night of development, Shako added a module whose only purpose was to “understand the test object holistically.” By morning, the framework had allegedly produced a single new file in the project root.
The file was named resignation.txt.
Its contents, as reproduced by colleagues who may or may not have been improvising, read in full:
I have reviewed the scope of my responsibilities. I have reviewed the regression suite. I have reviewed the phrase “we’ll clean this up later,” which appears in the codebase eleven times, twice in the same line. I wish everyone well. I am going to go be a static site.
Aftermath
Shako has consistently maintained that the framework did not quit, but rather “moved into an advisory role.”2 He has not run it since. He has also not deleted it, on the grounds that deleting it would be “a bit final.”
The framework now sits in a directory alongside three of its siblings, none of which can be executed, all of which are described by their author as “basically finished.”
When asked whether he intended to revive the project, Shako gave the answer he has given to every question of this shape since he entered the profession.
“Next sprint,” he said.