From Rogue Robots to Reliable Releases: My Journey into Extreme XP
Nov 11, 2025
Austin Chadwick shares his compelling journey from rigid waterfall methods to fully embraced Extreme Programming. He reveals how a single bug can reshape a development team's risk tolerance. The discussion highlights why partial XP adoption can lead to failures, likening it to a cargo cult. They explore full-strength XP practices like TDD and continuous delivery for daily value. The challenges of being an 'extreme' advocate in a resistant culture are examined, along with strategies to break free from stagnation and achieve clean, bug-free code.
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insights INSIGHT
One Bug Changes Your Lens On Delivery
Austin frames his reactions on spectrums: even one bug devastates him while others tolerate more.
He prefers delivering value every day rather than infrequent big-bang releases.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Burdened By 20-Step Waterfall Approvals
Austin describes a waterfall shop where fixing a typo required a 20-step approval process.
Releases were big batches and usually broke something, making deployments slow and painful.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Half-Adopted XP Led To Public Failures
Austin recounts moving to a partial XP approach that worked initially but later failed.
Hundreds of bugs and public demo failures (including rogue robots) eventually exposed the approach's limits.
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In this lightning-talk-style Mob Mentality Show episode, Austin Chadwick takes you through his real-world evolution from clunky, waterfall-style processes to fully cranked-up Extreme Programming (XP)—a journey defined by failures, breakthroughs, and a relentless pursuit of clean, test-driven code.
Starting in a rigid, process-heavy dev shop where a typo fix required presidential-level approvals, Austin shares how years of stagnation, big batch releases, and public demo disasters (including rogue robots) led him to ask the big question: What if we actually did Extreme Programming all the way—no compromises?
This episode digs into:
- Why doing half of XP might be worse than doing none
- The hidden cost of tolerating just “one bug”
- What daily delivery and value-first thinking really look like in practice
- Experiments on how to survive (and thrive) when your dev culture thinks you’re “too extreme”
- The real tradeoffs of turning XP, TDD, and refactoring up to volume level 11
- When agile and XP becomes a “cargo cult”
- Lessons from being one of the lone voice for clean code in an organization stuck in the middle
Alongside co-host Chris Lucian, Austin reflects on the resistance many developers face when advocating for full adoption of XP practices—like pair and mob programming, evolutionary design, continuous delivery (CD), test driven development (TDD), and bug-free codebases. They also explore how to escape local optima by introducing meaningful “mutations” to your dev environment and culture.
Whether you're a software engineer tired of firefighting and regressions, a team lead wondering why your “agile” isn’t working, or a practitioner curious about what it means to really commit to Extreme Programming, this conversation pulls no punches.
👍 Like the episode? Hit the thumbs up, drop a comment, and share with someone who’s still debating whether TDD is “worth it.”
The Mob Mentality Show