Ryan Brook (he/him/his)

Here's my twist on an old classic. If I've learnt anything by writing this, it's that I should stick to training Scrum and not writing poetry! 'Twas the night before Sprint Review, when all through the building Not a dev was there stirring, definitely not out chilling; The increment had been tagged on the Ops branch with care, In hopes that the stakeholders soon would be there; Most of the Scrum Team were all snug in their beds; While visions of acceptance criteria danced in their heads; The Product Owner whistled, alongside a Scrum Master clap, For they had just finished prepping a forecasted roadmap, When out in the pipeline there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my desk to see what was the matter. Away to the command line I flew like a flash, Sudo’d the Jenkins and entered my hash. The logs on the page of the new-tailed error, Gave the lustre of screw up, and Product Goal terror, When what to my wondering eyes did appear, But a missed carriage return, oh how they’re unclear, When a little old DBA so lively and quick, I knew in a moment he would give it a kick. More rapid than eagles his PRs they came, As he committed, and pushed, and called them by name: "Now, SQL! now, Java! now Angular and Bash! On, Python! on, Perl! on, C# and Stash! To the top of the class! to the top of the call! Now merge away! merge away! merge away all!" As code changes that before the wild Sprint Review fly, When they meet with a conflict, mount to the sky; So up to the repo the developer flew With a brain full of ideas, and hard resets, too— And then, in a moment, he got a little impatient Till he heard the whirring of a tiny little agent. As he drew in his head, and was checking the build, From the server his joyfulness truly was filled. He was dressed all in denim, from his head to his foot, The codebase was tarnished and almost caput; Of a bundle of value he had just got control, And he cheered like a child when he met the Sprint Goal. His code—how it sparkled! his comments, best all year! His rebases were awesome, finally his diff was clear! His droll little mouth was drawn like an array, Because of the outcomes he’d delivered, and he’d done it his way; The Definition of Done he’d met and exceeded, But the pressure it caused, damn! His hair had receded; He had a broad smile and a little round belly, Caused by too many Greggs, and trips to the deli. He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old engineer, But he was certainly magical, there’s no argument here; A wink of his eye and a groupadd for his name Soon gave me to know we were one and the same; He spoke not a word, but made his progress apparent, Into Jira he typed, his changes transparent. He picked up a pen, and to his colleagues wrote a note, He logged out of his terminal, and threw on his coat. He sprang to his car, to his engine gave a whistle, And away he then flew, for fear of dismissal. Then I rushed to his desk, I read the note, alright?— “Happy Sprint Review to all, and to all a good night!” Ryan is the primary trainer at Optilearn. He is an experienced Scrum Master, Agile Coach and educator. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org and also holds Qualified Teacher Status in the UK. Ryan believes that the best teachers are the ones who practise what they teach, and so he maintains active consultancy to constantly put theory into practice. To check out his upcoming classes, please look here.

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