Mistaken Impression of Agile
Agile methodologies don't advocate NO design as many people (even some agile practicioners I've met) mistakenly believe. The de-emphasis on design is a) because that activity does not provide the feedback necessary to know if the intended approach will work and b) a "design" is an abstraction. Agile methods encourage doing "just enough" design to set a direction. And they discourage being too formal in capturing the design (one reason is that doing so causes one to become attached/invested in the original design to the extent that it can become a constraint on the implementation instead of a guide).
I like to point out that in Robert Martin's book , Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices, he takes up a payroll case study and spends a whole chapter analysing use cases, deriving class hierarchies and drawing sequence diagrams before the first line of code is written. So true agilistas don't completely eschew up-front design, just BIG up-front design.
