Extreme Programming with its provocative name, got people’s attention in 1999. It is based on sound technical practices. Why do so few agile teams employ engineering practices that support the tight iterative cycles of Agile and Scrum? The creators of Scrum expected the continuous improvement cycle to pull engineering practices into teams once the cycle revealed the problems of poor product quality, hard to change code, wasted time debugging, long stabilization efforts and the ever growing burden of manual test. This talk will cut through the mystery and show why we should all strive for Technical Excellence.