What happens when you transition to agile practices at a big organisation? How can you do agile software development at scale? This month Sinead Shackley (@smshackley) and Dave Anderson (@davidand393) from Liberty IT and Paul Shepheard (@HamletArable) from Deutsche Bank share their stories.

In my work, I come across many organisations who desperately want to enjoy the benefits of practicing BDD, yet set themselves up for failure.

Growing new practices in your teams is a lot like growing plants: you need to create the right environment for the changes to take root and establish themselves. Did you ever bring one of those basil plants home from the supermarket, and three weeks later it was all limp and brown and, well, a bit dead?

That wasn’t the basil plant’s fault.

This weekend marked the 10th anniversary of Cucumber's first release, and we decided to celebrate with an open invitation to our community to join a mob programming session.

This week on the Cucumber Podcast, Sal Freudenberg and Matt Wynne speak to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. Rebecca is probably best known as an author of Designing Object-Oriented Software (1990) and Object Design (2002). For the past couple of months, Rebecca has jumped on the Cucumber Pro mob (read mob programming) to watch the team, notice heuristics, and contribute. The conversation follows that journey and how other teams can notice heuristics and ultimately deliver higher-quality software.

(A quick warning that this talk includes a heavy dose of swearing.)

Sal Freudenberg first delivered this talk at FFS Conf on September 19th 2018 in London.

Voici une édition spéciale du podcast Cucumber. En français, s’il vous plaît! Julien Biezemans, co-fondateur de Cucumber Ltd, discute BDD avec Bruno Boucard.

Seb Rose argues Behaviour-Driven Development is made of three separate practices; discovery, formulation, automation. The first practice, Discovery, is the subject of his latest book.

Many teams who use Cucumber miss out the discovery practice all together and don't benefit from discovering bugs and misunderstandings early on, often before any code is even written. In this talk, Seb Rose talks about the first practice of BDD and describes our preferred approach.

This is a guest post by Akshita Puram, Product Marketing Manager at SmartBear

Demands for releasing software deployments frequently, managing infinite combinations of devices, and creating standardization to increase velocity, has put pressure on software teams. Solutions for test automation, continuous integration, and DevOps have gained traction to address the constant plea for higher quality and faster development. Momentum for approaches such as “shift left” and “Behavior-Driven Development” (BDD) are also growing in software teams. However, it is unclear how many organizations are shifting their testing activities to occur earlier in the lifecycle, leaving many QA professionals suspicious of this trend.

This month on the Cucumber podcast, Aslak Hellesøy and Steve Tooke speak to Kenny Baas and Bruno Boucard about the relationship between Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD). While both share many similarities, there isn't a great deal of crossover between the two communities. Our two guests want to change that by demonstrating that both practices and communities have more in common than they may think.

This experience report was written by Sal Freudenberg and Matt Wynne, first published on the Agile Alliance site after XP 2018 in Porto.

Mob-programming is a young practice, only starting to be embraced by agile teams. Remote mob programming even more so; it is rarely practiced and so far only poorly understood. This experience report describes the way the Cucumber team, who are fully remote, practice mob programming and the surprising benefits we have discovered.