Cucumber Podcast

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

Show notes:

More about the Neurodiversity campaign - http://leanagile.scot/workshops/inclusive-collaboration/

The inclusion collaboration experiments book - https://leanpub.com/theinclusivecollaborationexperiments

http://www.lulu.com/shop/http://www.lulu.com/shop/sal-freudenberg-and-katherine-kirk/the-inclusive-collaboration-experiments/paperback/product-22927832.html

Twitter

https://twitter.com/inclusivecollab

https://twitter.com/SalFreudenberg

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.

SHOW NOTES:

Try out Loomio for distributed decision-making: https://www.loomio.org/

On twitter: https://twitter.com/richdecibels

Enspiral tales - https://medium.com/enspiral-tales

Enspiral handbook - https://handbook.enspiral.com/

Loomio handbook - https://loomio.coop/

Six Circles for Harmless Organisations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ar0HVzNeE&feature=youtu.be

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 (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-33515-5_24) 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.

Today we’re going to be talking about communities of practice and 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” [1]

In the organisations we work with, we encourage those with similar skill sets - testers for example - to get together with others in similar roles, who work in different departments. This wider pool of individuals can then support one another in their day-to-day work.

It could therefore be said agile faces a paradox; we have all battled for smaller, cross-functional teams to improve communication and learning, but are we now losing out on the wider knowledge held in other departments?

Communities of Practice is addressing this.

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.

You can find out more about Communities of Practice and Emily’s book on her website - http://emilywebber.co.uk/building-successful-communities-of-practice

Let us know your own experiences and thoughts on twitter @cucumberbdd or in the comments below.

You can also find this episode on iTunes - itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/cucumber-podcast-rss/id1078896635

[1] http://wenger-trayner.com/introduction-to-communities-of-practice/

On the podcast this week we discuss why diversity is important and what practical things we can do to increase it, specifically at our events. We also dive into our own experiences of being at conferences where diversity has either been very evident or completely absent, and give our reactions to that.

For five years now we've been running a tech conference, born out of the BDD and Cucumber community. We call it CukeUp! and run it annually in London and Sydney. The event attracts a mix of different roles; from developers to business analysts, testers to product owners. And to be quite honest it has evolved so much we consider it more a progressive agile conference than anything else.

In recent years we've made a conscious effort to increase the diversity of our events. Not just in terms of the content, but in our speaker line-up too. As organisers we are certain events which carry diverse views and opinions massively improves quality.

This podcast will explore our own experiences building diverse communities; why it's important and what we can do better.

This isn't just applicable to conference organising. If you are trying to build a community - either within your company or a side project - pick up ideas for making your project more welcoming and fun.

Joining Matt Wynne on the podcast is Elise Aplin and Arti Mathanda, both help us curate our CukeUp! line-ups in Sydney and London respectively.

CukeUp! AU is returning to Sydney this November. Learn more about our conference on our website - https://cucumber.io/events/cukeup-au-2016

The Call for Papers for CukeUp! AU is now open until August 5th 2016 - https://cucumber.typeform.com/to/cJHTsK

Cucumber’s popularity might give the impression it’s an easy tool to master. It ain’t! Many experienced Cucumber users have the bumps and bruises to prove it. Matt, Steve, and Aslak from the core Cucumber team discuss writing good gherkin and avoiding common pitfalls.

We’ll unpick why it’s important to write your gherkin before you write the code, consider if you should ever delete scenarios, and give tips on incorporating your team’s different perspectives into maintainable, predictable cukes!

You can subscribe via iTunes too. https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/cucumber-podcast-rss/id1078896635

“All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer.” That’s how Woody Zuill - who coined the term Mob Programming - describes it. He is our esteemed guest on the podcast, and we spend some time digging into his own experiences mobbing.

This is a fun episode for folks looking for novel ways to improve the certainty of their software.

Remember to like, share and subscribe on soundcloud or iTunes. It helps us reach more people!

Show notes:

The first Mob Programming Conference is happening May 1 & 2 at the Microsoft NERD Center at MIT in Cambridge MA. - http://mobprogramming.org/mob-programming-conference-may-1-and-2-2016/.

Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach (Book, work in progress) - https://leanpub.com/mobprogramming

We’re mobbing daily at Cucumber HQ and our host Steve Tooke put a post together at the end of last year - https://cucumber.io/blog/2015/12/21/the-mob-rules-ok

Drawing is a quick and graceful way to visualise your scenarios. When discussing complexity in our system, techniques which bring a voice to each stakeholder and break down user stories should be cherished.

We first heard about these ideas through Ulrika Malmgren at CukeUp! London last year. We chatted with Ulrika Malmgren about drawing and other techniques to bring teams closer together to build certain, coherent software.

Ulrika also tells us about her upcoming CukeUp! London talk, "Why Testers can be a Liability" happening next month. A talk with a contentious title is always a bonus. More information about CukeUp! can be found on the website - https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/7606-cukeup-2016#program

Tooky had to step out at the last moment so Aslak takes hosting duties with Matt Wynne alongside.

Show links:

CukeUp! London 2016 (April 14th-15th) The final batch of tickets are going fast, book soon! - https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/7606-cukeup-2016

Example Mapping blog post - https://cucumber.io/blog/2015/12/08/example-mapping-introduction

Illustrating Scenarios - https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/6228-illustrating-scenarios

Online whiteboard, Limnu - https://limnu.com/

Toki Pona - http://tokipona.org/

Reinventing organisations, book http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

Long before Behaviour-Driven Development was a term, John Smart was a proponent of bringing business and tech teams together. It was working for a French insurance company in the 90s, with complex (and peculiar) business rules, where the journey started:

“This was a car insurance company so you had to tell them where you lived, what sort of car you had, what colour it was, what sort of dog you had...everything.

The customer/product owner had these excel spreadsheets that he was using by himself to check the algorithms on the mainframe that we were supposed to be reproducing. So I said, maybe that could be useful - we can use those to drive our tests.

What we ended up with was a set of unit tests being driven by an Excel spreadsheet...Ever since then, I’ve been looking for ways to write tests that express things at the business level. So when I came across BDD it all fell into place. “

This week on the Cucumber Podcast, Matt Wynne, Aslak Hellesøy and Steve Tooke talk with John Smart about BDD, his upcoming CukeUp! workshop, and how Serenity can help your team write higher quality automated tests.

John Smart will be delivering a workshop at CukeUp! London on April 14th - skillsmatter.com/conferences/7606…eup-2016#program

John was a speaker at CukeUp! in Sydney last November.

His talk can be found here - cucumber.io/blog/2016/01/11/cuk…5-videos#john-smart

You can find out more about Serenity on his website - www.thucydides.info/#/

Other speaking engagements

- DevWeek London - devweek.com/speakers#john-smart

- Gee Con - 2016.geecon.org/speakers/info.html?id=87

- London Tester Gathering - skillsmatter.com/conferences/7219…g-workshops-2016

The wide adoption of agile has produced practices and tools that help teams communicate and deliver software effectively. But many activities we assume we *must* use don't add the value we hoped.

What happens when you throw out the rulebook and start at zero - will we see a marked improvement or just a Hobbesian mess?

We've invited Marcin Floryan and Seb Lambla on the pod to talk about their recent anarchic experiments at Spotify. What did they throw away and what did they keep. SPOILER - The planning meeting is first to go.

On the podcast:

Marcin Floryan - https://twitter.com/mfloryan

Seb Lambla - https://twitter.com/serialseb

Matt Wynne - https://twitter.com/mattwynne

Steve Tooke - https://twitter.com/tooky

Subscribe and share your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter - https://twitter.com/cucumberbdd

Watch their talk at Lean Agile Scotland from 2015 - http://leanagile.scot/sebastien-lambla-marcin-floryan-your-agile-is-dead/