The Cucumber Pro product team has been practicing mob programming for almost two years now. We’ve had periods where we drifted back to working in pairs, but for the last nine months mobbing has explicitly been our default behaviour as a team.

I think we’ve learned a lot from that, and I want to share some patterns I’ve noticed. As you read these thoughts, you should be aware that our mob is almost exclusively remote. We do meet up about once a month, but we tend to spend that time around a whiteboard rather than a keyboard.

On the podcast this month, Seb Rose and Steve Tooke speak to Allan Kelly, a well-known agile consultant and long-time friend of the pod.

Like a lot of teams we've gone back and forth on leaving TODO comments in the code. Are they useful or harmful. On the one hand we appreciated being able to quickly mark something as needing attention without giving it focus now and distracting us from what we were currently trying to do. On the other hand we felt bad when we came across lots of TODOs in the code that weren't getting fixed — the broken windows in our codebase.

This week on the Cucumber podcast Aslak Hellesøy speaks to Pia Mancini, co-founder of OpenCollective, about crowdfunding and our own efforts to raise money to support the open source community.

Why do cars have brakes? So they can go faster. This week on the Cucumber podcast Aslak Hellesøy speaks to Ben Rady and Josh Chisholm about running fast tests. Everyone knows fast tests are valuable, so why do so many companies abide slow ones?

I absolutely love open space.

Over the last couple of years, we've been privileged to be trusted by some of our best transformative coaching clients to run open space events in their organisations. I'm now convinced that these events are crucial in powering the cultural shift towards true agility in software development.

In this post I want give you a sense of what an open space is like and share some practical advice about how to run your own open space event.

This month on the Cucumber podcast, Matt Wynne speaks to Simon Powers, the founder of Adventures with Agile about Behaviour-Driven Development in banking. Simon was approached by the global investment bank BNP Paribas to review several product teams and to find out why the teams could not complete stories at the end of each sprint and why there was so many defects coming into the sprint. In just 9 months the defect rate decreased from 34% to 4% and they avoided a very costly rewrite. Listen to this podcast to hear how they did it and the lessons learned along the way. Simon's story can also be found on the Adventures with Agile blog.

There are four subsections to this article:

• TDD
• BDD
• Contradiction
• xDD

We’ll start off with an introduction to TDD. I’ll go through that quite quickly because I guess most of you reading this are already doing that. Then, I’ll spend a little more time on BDD and then deal with the contradictions between the two, before getting slightly more philosophical with xDD.

This month on the Cucumber podcast Aslak Hellesøy speaks to David MacIver and Nat Pryce about Property-Based Testing.

This was originally published on the Adventures with Agile blog by Simon Powers.

At a well known global investment bank, I was asked to review several product teams and to find out why the teams could not complete stories at the end of each sprint and why there was so many defects coming into the sprint.