[bipson]

I think here is the common misunderstanding:

No one says Agile can't have full blown requirements or the respective documents.

To the contrary, you can't expect your dev to understand what he has to write without giving him a goal he is working on - Agile won't fix that.

Agile just means you build in small steps from what you have and review your steps ASAP, instead of working multiple months based on some detailed documents, derived from other documents, written by some other department months ago, building stuff no one wanted in the first place.

[sethammons]

It seems the majority of comments miss what you are saying. We are an Agile Shop. We design things. We have to at scale. We review schema designs, query patterns, error handling strategies, monitoring, etc. Without that review, you get people doing silly things because most devs have less than 5 years experience. Deliver a minimal viable product and use customer feedback to iterate. The goal is to provide customer value as quickly and regularly as possible. This can include all the Excellence in Engineering standards you want.