During my final months there I realized that we were no longer doing XP, which made me think: “Why do we need an xP coach when we aren’t really doing xP?”

We would get out of xP mentor meetings and try to implement the changes we had talked about only to be told by management that we needed to sit down and write code. (?!?!?)
The biggest downer for me was that I BELIEVED in doing xP. I read the books, I remained enthusiastic and tried to lead/coach my team to better xP. The problem was: there was no support. The coach didn’t add any value. When we would tell the managers, there was this look of disbelief. “Why don’t you fix it?” Well, because we didn’t have the authority to fix it.

Now I get to do TDD (albeit by myself) and there are lots of opportunities for writing better code.