“Doubly Extreme Agile … Live”
Learn about and see the ‘Core Four’ in action ~ TDD/BDD, Refactoring, CI, Pairing/Ensemble

Join us as Rob and a few engineers apply the Core Four in this learning and sharing environment.
– What are the Core Four
– How might you apply them
– What does it look like when teams do it
– and more

Rob Myers has 36 years of professional experience in software development roles, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile engineering practices since 1998. His courses blend fun, practical, hands-on coding labs, “Training From the Back of the Room” advanced learning techniques, and relevant first-person stories from both successful and not-so-successful Agile implementations.

Rob is also writing a book, Essential Test-Driven Development, for Addison-Wesley, due out in 2023.

How Doubly Extreme Agile was Born

I first started teaching Behavior Driven Development (BDD) with Richard Lawrence, author of Behavior Driven Development with Cucumber. In his course, the whole team (dev, test, BAs, the PO, …) eventually sits together and works through one Gherkin scenario at a time. And when I say “works through” I mean they get it passing via the system under test before moving on. Sometimes they split up into pairs. Typically the pair is comprised of a tester and a developer. Sometimes two developers will pair up on a more challenging scenario, and use Test-Driven Development (TDD) to build up the code required to get the scenario to pass.

As part of the BDD training “package” we would return a month or six later, to help out with any challenges the teams had encountered. Often, these teams were still operating in a similar fashion: Often pairing up, often as a whole ensemble, to build new features. This whole-team approach is called “Mob Programming,” but Maaret Pyhäjärvi & Denise Yu have proposed “Ensemble” because it translates much more politely into most languages and cultures (including US English!)

I also had two other clients, who were already Ensemble Programming, and who wanted training or coaching in something besides BDD. One wanted to learn TDD, but then saw value in using Cucumber to create their business-readable product specifications, so we “pivoted” to BDD. Another wanted some brief training in refactoring and Design Patterns, and they shared with me that they had been exploring BDD, and already had a long history of using TDD.

So it seemed that all these clients had decided to combine Ensemble Programming & BDD for the long term.

(You can read more here: https://www.agileinstitute.com/articles/doubly-extreme-agile )

More Info RSVP