Matt Wynne

Matt was lucky enough to start programming in the mid 1980s when his dad brought home a BBC Micro from work.

He's been making a living as a programmer since the late 1990s, and started trying to sneak agile practices into his work ever since he discovered the C2 Wiki in 2001. He was once fired for doing Test-Driven Development (TDD), because he was “going too slow”.

In 2008 he joined the fledgling Cucumber open source project, and in 2011 the first edition of The Cucumber Book was published, co-written with Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of Cucumber.

In 2013 Matt co-founded Cucumber Limited together with Aslak and Julien Biezmans. They grew this consulting and training business to around $1.5m turnover, training thousands of people around the world in Cucumber and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), adding Seb Rose and Steve Tooke then Dr. Sal Freudenberg as partners.

Matt developed the practice of Example Mapping whilst training a team in St. Louis, Missouri.

Matt acted as Cucumber Ltd’s CEO for most of it’s life, handing over to Sal in the autumn of 2018. In 2019 Cucumber was acquired by SmartBear. Matt worked for them as full-time lead of the Cucumber Open source project until February 2023. One of his initiatives was finding ways to tackle the structural sexism and racism in open source.

Originally from northwest England, he now lives in the mountain town of Nelson, BC in Canada on the unceeded territory of the Ktunaxa Nation, Sinixt Nation, and Syilx Peoples with his wife, two kids, a dog and a couple of cats. He enjoys back-country skiing, trail running and woodworking.