For many years I was a development team manager. I recently heard Flanders and Swann’s “The gas man cometh” and as a tribute to them and all software development teams everywhere, I composed this little ditty.

‘Twas on a Monday morning the coder came to call.
The programme wouldn’t run – it wouldn’t work at all.
He opened all the jars and tinkered with the main,
And I had to call the tester to do the build again.

Oh it all makes work for the software team to do.

‘Twas on a Tuesday morning the tester came around.
She tested and she said: “See what I have found:
“I’ll run the unit tests and I’ll put it all to rights”
Then she ran the build again and out went Hudson’s lights

Oh it all makes work for the software team to do.

‘Twas on a Wednesday morning the system analyst came,
He called me Mr Daily which isn’t quite my name,
He asked me for my use case and what was my domain,
I said that all I wanted was my app to run again!

Oh it all makes work for the software team to do.

‘Twas on a Thursday morning the architect came along,
With his case tool and his patterns and his merry techie song,
He put another table in – it only took a minute
But I had to call the DBA to put some data in it.

Oh it all makes work for the software team to do.

‘Twas on a Friday morning the DBA made a start.
With constraints and foreign keys he locked down every part:
Every row and column – but I found when he had done
He’d changed the object structure and the programme wouldn’t run!

Oh it all makes work for the software team to do.

On Saturday and Sunday they do no work at all;
So ‘twas on the Monday morning that the coder came to call.