This morning, I collapsed a JIRA window and the text at the top of the Burndown Chart automatically contracted into a sort of weird poem...
Track the total work remaining and
project the likelihood of achieving
the sprint goal. This helps your team
manage its progress and respond
accordingly.
I know it doesn't scan like a poem, but it looks like someone trying to be arty, which is funny, because JIRA is probably the last place to find someone trying to be arty.
Of course, it's just responsive design, working out how to word-wrap a paragraph. It's poetry, accidentally created by a machine.
I started wondering if anyone's ever programmed a machine to write poetry. I don't mean with any particular kind of emotive elegance or profound meaning; I just mean an algorithm which is designed to find the most efficient rhyming word and fit it into the right number of syllables - even if it makes no sense at all. Like this:
Paul McCartney at the library
Picked a toothbrush up
He combed his hair
And chased a bear
Then won the FA cup
Or this:
I found a little monkey
Playing chess with JFK
I asked him who was winning
And they both said go away
Of course, thinking about it, it's much better to let imagination loose than trusting a machine to do your crazy thinking for you. I quite like the idea of splicing odd things together - a bit like a monkey playing chess with John F Kennedy or Paul McCartney chasing a bear out of a library. I like things which are just about imaginable, theoretically possible, but are so ridiculous that if you ever saw them, they would make you laugh for a week.
Like someone trying to be arty in JIRA, for example.
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