One of the difficulties of bringing a traditional top-down shop to agile is to get them out of the BDUF mentality. To do that, I’ve found that the only way that works is extremist TDD – whether I’m the one doing the organizational change, or somebody else is.

The problem that we then face is to prevent failure by the same extremist TDD we’ve introduced.

The flip-side of the problem is that if we “water-down” the agile/tdd message, we risk not being different enough from the status quo to get any traction.

What have you seen work?

The problem is that my YAGNI and your YAGNI are different. It’s difficult teaching agile (specifically YAGNI) to people with less design knowledge. At least, it has been difficult for me.

That’s just crazy talk. No one does TDD without putting some thought in to design and architecture. Or do they… Scary.

Experience allows you to start coding earlier in the process, by letting you know where your pain points will be in advance … inexperience says “unit tests will ensure our app grows and will work”