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.

Hiya! This month on the Cucumber Podcast we speak to Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson. They are probably best known for their association with the Agile Manifesto - Ron, one of the authors, Chet the first signatory. They've both done some other stuff too. This is a wide-ranging conversation hosted by Matt Wynne with fellow Cucumber people Sal Freudenberg, Steve Tooke and Aslak Hellesøy.

This was originally posted on my Medium blog.

Example Mapping is a simple but powerful tool. It can frame the conversations that help your team to build a shared understanding about what you are trying to build. It was discovered and popularised by Matt Wynne.

If you haven’t heard of Example Mapping before, Matt’s post Introducing Example Mapping is a great place to start. Alternatively, if you prefer video you can watch Aslak’s Example Mapping webinar.. Both of those resources, and many others online and at conferences, are a great way to understand how Example Mapping works and why it’s useful.

But how do you get started with your first Example Mapping session for you team? Having helped several teams introduce Example Mapping into their practices I wanted to share my tips for getting started.

This month on the Cucumber Podcast we speak to Beth Skurrie, who is the maintainer of the open-source project, Pact. Pact falls into the category of contract testing and with the advent of microservices and continuous delivery, it's getting more and more important. Seb Rose takes the hosting duties with extra questions from Steve Tooke.

This month on the Cucumber Podcast, we speak about The Screenplay Pattern. As John Ferguson describes it on his site, "the Screenplay Pattern is a powerful and elegant approach to designing and implementing automated tests, providing a number of improvements over more traditional approaches such as the Page Objects model."

The conversation covers why you should consider following the Screenplay Pattern and its potential drawbacks. The conversation closes with our guests providing a single tip for folks looking to try out the Screenplay Pattern on their own. Joining your host Aslak Hellesøy are John Smart, Jan Molak, Angie Jones, Nat Pryce, Matt Wynne and Steve Tooke.

The history of testers and developers working together is a bumpy road. Throughout the evolution of software development, testers have struggled to be treated as equals and developers have lacked the understanding of why they should care. Yet some teams do it well - both roles have a good experience and the resulting software benefits from the different perspectives. In this podcast, Franziska and Maaret speak to Matt Wynne to share some tips on how to improve this in your team.

In the past couple of years, lots of software teams have been using a simple collaborative technique called Example Mapping to break down user stories. It was conceived co-founder of Cucumber, Matt Wynne, who wrote the seminal post introducing the practice.

In this recorded webinar the creator of Cucumber, Aslak Hellesøy, introduces Example Mapping and answers a few questions with colleague Steve Tooke at the end.

On the podcast this month we discuss sexual harassment in tech. It's a subject that's been broadly covered in the news and we wanted to explore the experiences of women in tech and practical things we can all do to combat sexual harassment in our own communities. Your host Matt Wynne is joined by Sal Freudenberg, Arti Mathanda, Liz Keogh and Melissa Perri.