I am suprised to hear you say that. Maybe you're in an environmemt where agile is be applied differntly than the way I use it. Where I work Agile means work closely with business to develop soultions through iteration. This allows me to serve in many roles. I do my own BA and Architect work as well as writing the code and devoping the data model.

I've been writing code without specs for 10 years. My user's never ask me how long it will take because it never takes longer they think it should. The only problem i run into is that the folks that beleive in a more rigid process around app dev want to kill me. The bottom line is that coding isn't hard relative to the businesss problems the code solves. This our failure as a group. We think every project is about IT when it never is about IT. It's about the business. How can you ask them what they want? Most times they don't know specifically. Give them a rough app in two or three days, see what they think and go from there for a few months until it stabalizes then lock it down and document it. Like I said it's been working for me for almost ten years and the y only complaining I hear is from peers.

I came across a VB 2003 IDE quirk. If you have variables referenced in a select case stament in a sub the quick watch window seems to have trouble interacting with ide and cannot display the value of the variable. Specifically, I had a datatable defined inside the case statement. If I would add the datatable to the watch window all of its properties displayed "Error: cannot display value" in the value section of the watch. However wehen I moved all of the code in the case statement into its own sub the watch window behaved as i expected. Not sure whats going on there, be refactoring the sub made things cleaner anyway.