I am not a great fan of agile and people that argue strongly for it. I like tools that encourage critical thinking and design development docs, well defined prototypes, and working on customer requirements docs. I think Agile in it's most naive form makes those things harder than they need to be, but of course you can fit good practice into almost any framework.

I am though a big fan of frequent checkpoints, and checking in with the 'big engineering' / 'refactor everything' people before they get too carried away with code only tangentially related to the business case. Agile provides a really good 'excuse' to do the check in, demo code, and a time to reflect if what the developer has is good enough to hit the aforementioned customer requirements.