We officially welcome you to the start of Red Green Refactor, a technology blog about automation and DevOps. We are a group of passionate technologists who care about learning and sharing our knowledge. Information Technology is a huge field and even though we’re a small part of it – we wanted another outlet to collaborate with the community.
Why Red Green Refactor?
Red Green Refactor is a term commonly used in Test Driven Development to support a test first approach to software design. Kent Beck is generally credited with discovering or “rediscovering” the phrase “Test Driven Development”. The mantra for the practice is red-green-refactor, where the colors refer to the status of the test driving the development code.
The Red is writing a small piece of test code without the development code implemented. The test should fail upon execution – a red failure. The Green is writing just enough development code to get the test code to pass. The test should pass upon execution – a green pass. The Refactor is making small improvements to the development code without affecting the behavior. The quality of the code is improved according to team standards, addressing “code smells” (making the code readable, maintainable, removing duplication), or using simple design patterns. The point of the practice is to make the code more robust by catching the mistakes early, with an eye on quality of the code from the beginning. Writing in small batches helps the practitioner think about the design of their program consistently.
“Refactoring is a controlled technique for improving the design of an existing codebase.”
Martin Fowler
The goal of Red Green Refactor is similar to the practice of refactoring: to make small-yet-cumulative positive changes, but instead in learning to help educate the community about automation and DevOps. The act of publishing also encourages our team to refine our materials in preparation for a larger audience. Many of the writers on Red Green Refactor speak at conferences, professional groups, and the occasional webinar. The learning at Red Green Refactor will be bi-directional – to the readers and to the writers.
Who Are We?
The writers on Red Green Refactor come from varied backgrounds but all of us made our way into information technology, some purposefully and some accidentally. Our primary focus was on test automation, which has evolved into DevOps practices as we expanded our scope into operations. Occasionally we will invite external contributors to post on a subject of interest. We have a few invited writers lined up and ready to contribute.
As for myself, I have a background in Physics & Biophysics, with over a decade spent in research science studying fluorescence spectroscopy and microscopy before joining IT. I’ve worked as a requirements analyst, developer, and tester before joining the ranks of pointed-headed management. That doesn’t stop me from exploring new tech at home though or posting about it on a blog.
What Can You Expect From Red Green Refactor?
Technology
Some companies are in the .NET stack, some are Java shops, but everyone needs some form of automation. The result is many varied implementations of both test & task automation. Our team has supported almost all the application types under the sun (desktop, web, mobile, database, API/services, mainframe, etc.). We’ve also explored with many tools both open-source and commercial at companies with ancient tech and bleeding edge. Our posts will be driven by both prior experience as well as exploration to the unknown.
We’ll be exploring programming languages and tools in the automation space. Readers can expect to learn about frameworks, cloud solutions, CI/CD, design patterns, code reviews, refactoring, metrics, implementation strategies, performance testing, etc. – it’s open ended.
Continuous Improvement
We aim to keep our readers informed about continuous improvement activities in the community. One of the great things about this field is there is so much to learn and it’s ever-changing. It can be difficult at times with the firehose of information coming at you since there are only so many hours in the day. We tend to divide responsibility among our group to perform “deep dives” into certain topics and then share that knowledge with a wider audience (for example: Docker, Analytics or Robot Process Automation). In the same spirit we plan to share information on Red Green Refactor about continuous improvement. Posts about continuous improvement will include: trainings, conference recaps, professional groups, aggregated articles, podcasts, tech book summaries, career development, and even the occasional job posting.
Once again welcome to Red Green Refactor. Your feedback is always welcome.
