It’s no surprise—Agile is often misunderstood as little more than two-week sprints, burn-down charts, and daily stand-up meetings. In reality, Agile isn’t a micro-management framework; it’s a mindset rooted in continuous improvement and technical excellence.

When Extreme Programming (XP) emerged in 1999 with its provocative name, it challenged the status quo with sound engineering practices designed to support tight iterative cycles. Yet today, many Agile teams struggle to integrate these practices, leading to poor product quality, hard-to-change code, endless debugging, long stabilization phases, and the growing burden of manual testing.

In this keynote, we’ll cut through the noise to uncover why Technical Excellence is the cornerstone of successful Agile teams. You’ll discover how XP practices like test-driven development, refactoring, and automation can address the hidden challenges of Agile and set your team on the path to true agility.