“DEVS” - Behind The Scenes of This Awesome Parody

In February of 2025, I put together a cast and film crew to produce a new song parody, called “Devs” based on a 70’s song by the band KISS. This article is a behind the scenes look at the making of that video.

Note: This parody music video was graciously sponsored by Tricentis and Tricentis for Dev Teams, and it is part of their new “Dear Bugsy” series, which I highly recommend. You can find out more about that at

https://bit.ly/dearbugsy

Age Old Schisms: Testing Versus Devs

There is a well-known schism between the software developers and quality assurance professionals. For all of the efforts in Agile development to merge testing into the development process, there still exist silos. On one hand, the development team feels that the testing causes friction in the deployment of new features – especially true in these times of continuous development, integration, and deployment. The testing team feels unappreciated for their mission to catch software defects before they reach production, and before an end user experiences it.

Even in a DevOps model, this contention can be very real. It takes effort to unify the process to relieve this friction. In recent years, developers have taken a more prominent role in “owning” their features to the point of production release, including testing. In some cases, this has caused testing to be relegated to a lower priority. In fact, many developers tout that “nothing sounds like money more than production code”, not underscoring the fact that this production code may be inefficient, buggy, and a higher risk to customers.

It is this contention that fuels the latest music parody, “Devs”. I wanted to create a fictional scenario where the quality assurance team had taken the idea that they were so integral to the company, they had become over confident. This is totally opposite to what we see most of the time in organizations, so I wanted to cause some cognitive dissonance. They had the idea that they were the “rock stars” of the company – so they dressed and acted like rock stars. Obviously, this would be outrageous and the developers would never take them seriously. Nonetheless, they were dedicated to the role. The exaggeration of the relationship between tester and developer is somewhat unrealistic (or should be) in a modern software development shop – but the parody lends itself to ridiculousness, and for me – it works.

QA Are The Rock Stars

I can think of no bigger “rock star” egos than that of the band KISS. I decided that we should do a parody of “Beth” for several reasons. Although the band is known for their high energy 70’s hard rock sound and outrageous stage shows, this subtle ballad is still their biggest commercial hit. It won the 1977 People’s Choice award for “Favorite Song”. It was written and performed by the drummer (Peter Criss). Much has been written about the contention Criss had with the main band members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Their autobiographies talk about him with much disdain. This helps reinforce the kind of contention we see between QA and Devs.

The lyrics to the original song are about a girlfriend / wife of one of the band members calling the band during rehearsals to see when they would be coming home, and the conversation is basically the guy telling her they have to keep practicing. He is prioritizing the band and his musical career over their relationship. In my version, we talk about the developers being anxious that their software deployments are being delayed by so much testing. The tester is finding so many defects that they have to continue testing “all night” to finish their work. Features and product release schedules are sometimes prioritized over the quality of a product.

How The Video Idea For Devs Took Shape

The parody version of the song was recorded in early 2024 because I anticipated releasing it that year. All of the music was performed by grammy award winning mix engineer J.R. McNeely (https://www.youtube.com/c/JRMcNeelyMusic) . However, the video was delayed due to budget constraints. I found KISS costumes in a story in Las Vegas when I was attending a conference there. I had everything in place and just had to wait on the word. In 2025 when the budget was approved, I contacted my team of hand selected people to be part of the video.

Initially, I wanted to make a gesture to the now infamous made for TV movie KISS released in 1978 called “KISS meets the phantom of the park” by recreating some of the scenes. However, we had to keep a focus on the topic at hand and were limited by the filming budget.

If you have never seen the movie, you really aren’t missing that much. It was pretty terrible by most standards. For years after its airing, no one who worked for the group was permitted to mention the film in their presence. It still became a cult classic, and was a part of many people’s childhood during the height of the band’s popularity.

Filming Devs In Nashville Tennessee

We filmed this video in Nashville in late February. During the early part of the day, we filmed in a shared office space in Murfreesboro. We used a meeting room to set up the equipment and do the makeup. We used several spaces in the office to complete the scenes you see in the video. I want to thank Scott Graby at Hearthstone Properties for letting us use the Studio at Fountains for half a day. I also want to thank Dennis Hurst at Saltworks Security (https://saltworks.io) for allowing us to use their spaces in the building during filming. Dennis is the male software developer in the office scenes with us.

The band members were made up of Ron Foster (security professional at Saltworks Security and one of my closest friends), Erik Pena (who I have known for 20 years) and is a performance engineer in his own right, Matt Parker (aka Parker the Bandit) who is a local musician and artist that writes and plays some great original music that you should check out at https://www.parkerthebandit.com/.

Ron Foster – Starchild (Paul Stanley)

Parker – Space Ace (Ace Frehley)

Erik Pena – Demon (Gene Simmons)

Scott Moore – Cat Man (Peter Criss)

I have to give Erik Pena credit for taking his role as Gene Simmons seriously, and making it so over the top. It makes the scenes even more hilarious.

The guitar used by “Ace” is my very own 1981 Gibson Les Paul that I have had since my 15th birthday. I have played this guitar most of my life. It is similar to the ones played by Ace Frehley – however, he usually had three pickups instead of the standard two. It was being able to have this guitar featured in the video.

The female developer in the office scene was played by Katy Parker (Matt’s wife), who did a splendid job as a computer nerd.

The videography for Devs is done by Luke Taylor (https://www.luketaylorfilm.com/about) who has been doing this with me for four years now. We make a heck of a team, and Luke always gets out to video what is inside of my crazy head.

After filming at the office, Luke and I had to travel an hour across town to Portland, Tennessee to film the piano scene. I had to say that driving in heavy traffic in full KISS makeup was a site for the other drivers to behold. We finally made it to my friend’s house – who just happens to be Randall Griffith – a well known keyboard player in country music for decades. He also builds recording studios. He had an excellent space with a large Yamaha grand piano that was perfect for getting the singing shots while seated at the piano. We used fake led candles and special lighting to get the mellow effect you see. By contrasting this serious, mellow scene with the office scenes where the developers and testers are constantly in a battle makes the drama that much more hilarious. Thanks to Randall for the use of his home to get those shots.

We wanted to make sure that our sponsor was represented well, so we made sure to include ways to feature the Tricentis Testim software in the video. Tricentis Testim is a great functional testing software solution for customers working in a DevOps model. It has cutting edge AI features that speed up the testing process. You should definitely check them out at https://www.tricentis.com/products/test-automation-web-apps-testim

I knew we needed a strong graphic to release to announce the video, so I thought I would recreate the album cover for the 1976 Dynasty album as close as possible. I had pictures taken of my face for each KISS band member, and I tried to copy their expressions as closely as possible. I replaced the band name with K8s as a reference to Kubernetes, and used the title fo the song “Devs” instead of the word “Dynastry”. Saad Ali at Saad Visuals (https://www.instagram.com/saad_visuals/) did the graphic for this, overlaying the makeup over my face and putting in the long back hair. Saad nails it everytime!

I hope you enjoy this music parody as much as we enjoyed making it. Let me know what you thought of it. If you still have not seen it, you can watch it at this link: