The biggest strength of Agile Development is its biggest weakness as well i.e. ‘narrowed vision’. You don’t see the problem as a whole but as bunch of problems jumbled together, with assumption that each piece of problem is independent (or less dependent) of another. This assumption may & may not be true in real life.

I like agile development but my style is not Pure-Agile. I had limited the scope of agile development to SQL coding only. It doesn’t include Data Modeling. The reason is simple (and to follow the building analogy) to make the solid foundation & skeleton for the building first. Once I am convinced that the foundation can handle few floors weights without much adjustment, I don’t care which room of the building or which floor user wants to see first.

I would like to add here that few of my colleagues read about Agile DEV from BOL or some BLOG and blindly started following it. The projects been delivered to customers and customer was happy as well. But the delivery involved too much integration costs and over-time of DEV team. It’s not feasible IMHO.