Gáspár Nagy is the creator of Specflow, the .NET version of Cucumber. Based in Budapest, Gaspar is an independent BDD and Specflow trainer and coach. He is also writing a new book about Specflow in collaboration with Seb Rose. Joining him on the podcast this month are Aslak Hellesoy, Matt Wynne and Arti Mathanda. They discuss the upcoming book, the role of QA in modern teams and plenty more.

This month on the Cucumber podcast we speak to Llewellyn Falco. He's best known for two things: approval testing and mob programming. As we've covered mobbing in great detail on the pod lately, we dig into approval testing. Pitching questions from the Cucumber team are Steve Tooke, Aslak Hellesoy, and Seb Rose.

This week on the Cucumber Podcast, Matt Wynne speaks to Sal Freudenberg about inclusive collaboration and neurodiversity.

This week we’re speaking to Loomio co-founder and Enspiral member, Richard Bartlett. In 2011, Richard found himself at the heart of the Occupy movement in Wellington, New Zealand. For the first couple of months, the camp was growing 20% per day, and no one was driving it. Although Occupy ultimately collapsed, Richard, along with some others from the movement, continued to explore how organisations and groups can self-organise at scale. We cover Richard’s own background and feed these ideas back into how software teams can spark change even in the largest companies.

I've never liked working in hierarchical organisations. One of the reasons we were all drawn to work on Cucumber the open source project, I think, is that we all enjoy that beautiful combination of autonomy and community. As we set out to build a company of our own, I've been searching for ideas about how to structure our organisation so that we can keep the spirit of the original open source project alive in everything we do.

One source of inspiration I came across on this search was Enspiral, a collective founded in New Zealand. They use collective decision-making, and fund ventures from within the collective using a collaborative budgeting method. Started as a small group of friends in a co-working space, they have grown to 40 members and over 250 contributors, with successful ventures like Loomio.

When I learned that Enspiral were opening their doors to share their culture and methods in a series of half-day workshops, I had to be there.

Can XP improve the experiences of women software developers? Clare Sudbery, a developer with 17 years experience in the industry, certainly thinks so. Clare has been involved in traditional waterfall projects and most recently XP. Earlier this year, she wrote an academic paper about her own experiences in an XP team and how it impacted her. Clare feels many of the difficulties associated with being a minority have subsided since working in an XP environment. "My belief is that XP creates a more conducive environment for women and other minorities within the industry. I believe that XP can – and should – pave the way to making the tech industry a more welcoming and attractive place for women." In the podcast we discuss the ideas found in her paper and what progressive teams can do to improve their own working environment.

If you haven't read our first blog post already, start by doing that over here. Some of the examples we use in the first post will be referenced below.

Practicing Cucumber and BDD is often tricky for new teams. There's plenty of information out there, but who to believe? Core to our business is helping teams around the world implement BDD practices into production. In the past few years we've helped hundreds of teams do this successfully through our in-house and online training.

This post is an edited conversation between Cucumber's Steve Tooke, Aslak Hellesøy and Matt Wynne.

Today we’re going to be talking about communities of practice and exploring how they can support learning in your company. Communities of practice are “formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavor”.

To join us to discuss the subject we’ve invited Emily Webber, an independent agile and lean consultant, who has recently published her book “Building Successful Communities of Practice”. This week’s host, Matt Wynne, is also joined by our podcast regulars, Arti Mathanda and Seb Rose.

When I was at the European Testing Conference 2016 in Bucharest, a colleague asked for my thoughts on how they should use Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). I had to run off and didn't get a chance to elaborate on my view, so I decided that I should write it down instead.

My first thought was pretty simple. As long they were talking, and using BDD as a framework for understanding each other, they were on the right track. They were already specifying
what the application should do by writing Gherkin to capture the conversations.

But writing Gherkin is not the most important part here; it's about creating a common understanding.

This post outlines our favourite Cucumber anti-patterns. There are many ways to use tools poorly and, as the core team behind Cucumber, we've picked up our fair share of bumps and bruises. Hopefully by passing on our own experiences, we can help you steer clear of the most common pitfalls.

Along the way we'll also clarify why these patterns can be so damaging and suggest alternatives we've seen work while training and coaching teams around the world.

This is a two-part blog post based on a conversation between Steve Tooke, Aslak Hellesøy and Matt Wynne on The Cucumber Podcast. You can skip ahead to part two here.