A team I'm coaching just now is making an effort to embrace sound software engineering practices as part of implementing agile and lean thinking in their work. It happens that the story of Xiang Yu came up on the Scrum Development mailing list today, and it resonated with me. Team members were struggling with the tension between delivering their customary number of story points versus taking the time to remediate missing unit tests and adding customer acceptance tests, which would reduce their velocity temporarily. I would not take Xiang Yu as a role model generally, but one of his exploits suggests a practical approach to embracing new practices.
If you're serious about improving your software engineering practices, then kill your inner Song Yi and burn your boats. Take only enough with you for the battle at hand (commit to what you will deliver next and focus on that). Let there be no retreat to hacking, no retreat to crystal-balling. The only way forward is forward.