My first exposure to agile lead me to think of it as the bodge it and wing it methodology. It fundamentally isn't. It isn't even a methodology, it is a set of principles.

The means by which requirements are gathered and designs produced is much more informal but the shortness of communication lines means that it is much more relevant. I've just had the first team meeting on a project and straight away a discussion begins on the way in which the business users want to capture contact details on a form. This discussion is mainly beween the poor sods who are actually going to use the system and the poor sods who are actually going to develop it. The traditional approach would be for an analyst to talk to a line manager and produce a document that (assuming it was read thoroughly) could be mis-understood by all.

Early on in the project a great deal of time is spent at whiteboards drawing out how the system will work from the user perspective and how the fundamental architecture will look. The resulting drawings are photographed and the resulting jpegs captured for further reference. In fact the first itteration is usually ALL design and feasibility studies.

Subsequent iterations also have a lot of design discussions but will actually produce test cases and code.

If you've not done it before it is very alien. Expect it to be 3-6 months before you start to feel comfortable with it. I think it will probably be 12 months before you are as productive with agile as you were with previous approaches.

If you do it correctly you should see quality improve. I stress again, it takes quite a while for the processes that come under the banner of agile development bed in.