The methods are way useful anytime you're building software. The whole agile/lean methodologies was actually a grassroots movement that started in smaller team

The methods are way useful anytime you're building software. The whole agile/lean methodologies was actually a grassroots movement that started in smaller teams and startups and had to be pushed into the enterprise world by activists. I can understand your comment about shivers because by now it's become a full on buzzword and lots of business people use them without having any idea what they're talking about. If you can ignore the empty hype, there is still a lot of value in the actual practices. A lot of the practices are things that startups do naturally because it fits well. Iterating quickly, continuous integration and deployment, automated testing, user stories. "Agile" is a movement, for lack of a better word, based on doing more of what works (focusing on people and productivity) and less on what doesn't (bulky processes). It was a reaction to the heavy waterfall, process-centric methods used that were slowing productivity down to a halt. Now that people who love paperwork have gotten their hands on it, they want to turn agile into something it's not. Anyone who tells you that you HAVE to do X, Y, and Z processes to be agile is wrong. It's about works best in your team and being open to trying new things to find out what that best thing is.