I'm not exactly a huge agile fan, but there are a few things it gets right. Most of the time, software development is implicitly a process of requirements deve

I'm not exactly a huge agile fan, but there are a few things it gets right. Most of the time, software development is implicitly a process of requirements development. Nobody ever knows what they want until they see it, even if they claim they do. Agile attempts to turn the implicit requirements development into explicit requirements development. It tries to shortcut the process of acquiring requirements by getting stuff in front of the user as fast as possible. Now, if you really do know the requirements (like there's a real spec to follow) or you're in a situation where you don't have the architecture decided so that you can show discrete things in a small time window (2-3 weeks), then agile isn't nearly as useful.