Jim Coplien talking about "Agile Stuff"

The Agile track is covered pretty well at JavaZone 2007, we have a lot of good speakers doing agile-talks. This is very much thanks to Jessica Hildrum that seems to be very well connected. Jim has been looking into agile issues for the past 12 years and works for a Danish company called Nordija.
Most of the projects that I have been working on lately has been organized in an Agile matter, Jim goes into the some details on explaining some common myths on agile processes and what works and whatnot. The five Myths discussed are:

• On-Site customer
• User Stories
• TDD
• YAGNI
• DLS's

Before Jim starts to talk out, I will poin out the ones that I wold tend to focus on, from a developers perspective will be YAGNI and TDD. Jim tells us that it doesn't work, he's go me curious.
Jim clains that TDD will destroy your system, which is a pretty bald claim, nonetheless interesting. He claims that you will end-up building an unmaintainable and procedural architecture, which does not lend itself to refactoring. Well, he is getting my attention. I simply do not agree. I think what Jim thinks about here is that Unit testing at the JUnit level is not really testing of customer requirements, and he is perfectly right. It is tests testing parts of the system implemented using classes to build an object oriented system. This means requirements translated into something computionally feasible. Maybe I am not using TDD properly, but I do not expect that my JUnit tests maps one-to-one to functional-requirements.

What Jim misses out on here, especially with respect to saying that YAGNI will kill you is what Mary Poppendieck states about eliminating waste. I am a strong believer in up-front design, but I am not a strong beleiver in building anticipated structures, especially without tests. I think you should really eliminate waste.