Agile Kitchen: Extreme Programming – the knowledge we lost

Tuesday, 22 September 2026 18.00h – 22.00h Apollo put twelve people on the moon in three and a half years, and then it stopped. We’re still trying to get back, and it turns out the hard part was never the rockets. The engineers retired. The suppliers closed. The blueprints survived, but the thousand small judgments that made them work were never written down. At the time, everybody simply knew them. That’s what losing knowledge looks like. No decision, no disaster. Just a slow drain you don’t notice until you try to do the thing again and find you can’t. Now look at your own team. All the buzzwords are still there: pair programming, test-driven development, refactoring and continuous integration. People sit in open-plan offices wearing headphones 90% of the time. Tests that were supposed to design the code are written afterwards, if there’s time. Technical debt is spinning out of control. Refactoring sprints anyone? Senior developers write comments on pull requests, thinking that this is what coaching others is all about. Extreme Programming gave our industry a set of practices that made genuinely good software possible, and we’re quietly forgetting them while still using their words. First, what is Extreme Programming? XP is an Agile approach from the late 1990s, born around the same time as Scrum. The difference is worth knowing: Scrum describes how a team organizes its work, XP describes how a team actually builds the software. Short cycles, and a handful of practices that keep the code healthy enough to keep changing it: pair programming, test-driven development, continuous integration, refactoring, small releases. Together they answer a question Scrum never really addresses: what does it take for a team to still be able to change direction in year three? Why this matters even if you never write code If you coach, facilitate or lead teams, you have probably met this problem without ever naming it. Sprints that keep slipping. A backlog growing faster than the team can move. The same frustration surfacing in every retrospective and never resolving. Estimates that everyone privately knows are fiction. The instinct is to look at the process. More refinement. Better slicing. A cleaner definition of done. But very often the real cause sits one layer below the process: the codebase has become expensive to change, and no facilitation technique can fix that from the outside. Agility isn’t only a way of working. It rests on technical practices that make change cheap. When those practices quietly erode, a team loses its ability to respond, and everything you try at the process level starts to feel like pushing on a locked door. You don’t need to write code to get value out of this evening. You need to understand what’s happening underneath the process you’re trying to improve, and to be able to name it when you see it. Why join this session Jan Van Ryswyck takes us back to where XP came from, what problems it was actually built to solve, and what each of its core practices was really meant to do. Not as history for its own sake, but so you can recognize the watered-down version when you’re living inside it. You will understand where Extreme Programming came from and which real problems it was built to solve. You will walk through each core practice and see the value it delivers, rather than what the ritual has become. You will be able to spot the diluted version of a practice in your own team, and put words to what’s missing from it. You will understand how technical practices and team agility are connected, which makes for far better conversations with the developers you work with. You will leave with a sense of where to take these practices next, in your context and with your constraints. A real understanding of XP pays dividends for the rest of your career, whether you build software or help teams build it well. This session gets you started. Join this Agile Kitchen session What to expect from this session True to the Agile Kitchen spirit, this is a session with room to talk back. Jan brings two decades of hands-on practice rather than a slide deck of theory. The origin story: Where XP came from and which problems it set out to solve. The practices: Each core practice, what it’s worth, and where it goes wrong. The exchange: Open discussion and Q&A grounded in your context, not a generic one. Who’s hosting this session Jan Van Ryswyck has been a professional software developer since 2000 and writing about it since 2005. He is a technical coach specialized in XP practices, the author of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests, and the curator of the Awesome Talks list. Jan has spent years working on test strategy inside organizations like Cegeka and many more. He speaks regularly at conferences including DDD Europe and Full Stack Europe. Jan is someone who has actually done the work, on real codebases, with real teams and real deadlines. His goal as a software craftsman is: simple, high-quality solutions to complex business problems. Sharing what he has learned along the way is a close second. Who is this Agile Kitchen session for? This session is for anyone who: Coaches or facilitates teams and wants to understand what’s happening underneath the process they’re improving Leads a team that keeps hitting the same wall, and suspects the ceremonies aren’t the problem Drives change in an organization where “we’re Agile” and “we can’t change this code” are both true at once Has watched a good practice get diluted into a formality, and wondered exactly when that happened Writes code, reviews code, or is responsible for the quality of it, and learned these practices second-hand Has a definition of done that everyone agreed to and nobody quite follows Whether you’re a Scrum Master, coach, team lead, change agent, developer or architect, you’ll leave with something tangible. If you work with a development team, this one is for you. The essentials Date: Tuesday, 22 September 2026 Time: Doors open: 18:00 Session starts: 18:15 Wrap-up and drinks from 20:30 End of evening: 22:00 Location: Cronos HQ – Veldkant 33a, 2550 Kontich Language: English Food and drinks: Included Price: Free. Spaces fill up fast. Don’t wait too long. Bring your questions. Bring your curiosity. Leave with something useful. Join this Agile Kitchen session