Red Green Refactor refers to a sequence of activities you take when practicing Test Driven Development: you write failing test, make it pass, and then refactor to remove duplication. Test Driven Development is one of the core engineering practices of eXtreme Programming. I am convinced that eXtreme Programming is indispensable if you want to deliver quality software in the shortest possible time.

Agile, Lean, and Scrum are very popular these days. They all emphasise improving communication within your team, giving more attention to people, removing waste and duplication from your process, and finally: continuous improvement. However, the important thing to realise is that bringing lean thinking to your organisation is not an instant process. Becoming lean - or agile - often means changing your organisation culture. Changing culture might take a long time: not weeks, not months but sometimes even years. The reward can be significant, but you should be prepared that it won't be easy.

In order to facilitate this cultural change you have to base your development on solid engineering practices. The culture and the engineering practices must support each other or there will be no success. It is quite possible you will observe local improvements, but on a larger scale there will be no visible change.

Scrum will not build your product. Scrum is a framework, it is a facilitator. And if you want to use Scrum to build your software, you need to complement Scrum with solid engineering practices. Fortunately, you do not have to look very far. eXtreme Programming provides all engineering practices you might ever need.

When bringing Scrum to your organisation, I therefore focus on the engineering practices. The two most important engineering practices you have to implement are Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration. If Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration are not there, you are wasting your time and money. I can help your developers to take advantage of the test driven approach. I will also help your team to create maintainable, staged continuous integration system: from automated builds, through automated unit and integration tests, on automated acceptance tests finishing.

With more than 10 years of experience in Embedded Systems I know what makes them different and how to mitigate the problems you might encounter there when implementing eXtreme Programming.

I am inviting you to take a look at my services, browse through available resources, and subscribe to my blog. Don't hesitate to contact me if you want to improve your development.