Effective BDD: Seb Rose and Gaspar Nagy on Real Collaboration, Example Mapping, and Automation Patterns

In this episode of The Mob Mentality Show, we sit down with Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose, two highly respected voices in the Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) community, to discuss their brand-new book, Effective Behavior-Driven Development, published by Manning Publications.

Seb and Gáspár share their hard-won insights from over 15 years of helping teams adopt BDD the right way—focusing not just on tools or syntax, but on real collaboration, shared understanding, and sustainable automation practices.

You’ll learn how Example Mapping helps teams uncover hidden assumptions, why Automation Patterns matter for long-term maintainability, and how the Effective BDD book brings together their previous works on Discovery, Formulation, and Automation into one cohesive guide for practitioners.

The conversation covers:
- What “effective” BDD really looks like in modern agile teams
- Why collaboration—not tooling—is the true heart of BDD
- How Example Mapping accelerates shared understanding and reduces rework
- What automation patterns many test suite needs (and what pitfalls to avoid)
- How to write maintainable, meaningful, and human-readable scenarios
- Insights from their journey creating Effective BDD and its roots in the patterns community
- Real-world lessons from decades of coaching, training, and hands-on development

Whether you’re a developer, tester, product owner, or agile coach, this episode will help you see BDD not as a buzzword, but as an actual way to turn up the good on collaboration and quality for software delivery.

Video and Show Notes: https://youtu.be/0Yf8oPPKlv8