What are the limitations of Agile software development?

The agile process really is adneraline rush for a technology hungry contributor. It does really challenge him to design, develop, test a fairly complex module in not more than 10 days of time. This however may seem to be a challenging ground for him, in effect it has its other side effects. The developer has very little time to think and retrospect about what can he do better!!! He really doesn't flex his brains on whether this is the right solution. But then comes the experience factor. No matter how much experience a person is he is bound to break in the short span of 10 day sprint. no doubt that the agile process gets you the product faster in the market, but can it really be the best product.

I would really like to ask, as am incapable of answering this, how many reliable products are there in market which has adopted agile development from scratch? Are those products able to give a better reliablity and performance when compared against the products which are "Non Agile", so as to speak.!!!!

Agile has been designed by experienced, smart, and high achieving people. Someone wisely pointed out recently that they naturally designed agile for people just like them who are like celebrity in the organization. Not everybody’s a celebrity what happens to the common man then. The thing is with great IT professionals, You could have given them any project, with waterfall method or even no method at all, and they would probably have succeeded in any way. Indeed, not every group can be motivated, experienced, and skilled enough to self organize into an efficient team by themselves, come up with lightweight processes, and collaborate seamlessly to achieve that great agile teamwork.  This is a limitation, where not enough professionals out there to bring agility.

Agile matches the entrepreneur pattern for success. Produce fast for the client/market, have them explore it, and adjust, discard, create quickly based on the feedback. Social and startup and growing entrepreneurs share the same pattern as an adept agile team.   Painting agile with other viewpoints is ignoring the implicit success pattern that has shown itself in war, business, and software development. "Art of War" strategy is agile. Rommel was agile and acted akin to an entrepreneur in quickly taking advantages of the opportunities he found.

Good Topic Kiran! One of the most important point, it is called "The HERD Mentatility" also known as Follow the leader. This is a processes where everyone follows what the celebrity software proffessionals have to say without questioning his order thinking what he saying is the truth based on his years of experience. Thereby creating less involvement from the rest of the team  - Based on current life experience :)

Agile development goes on iteration where each feature is released over a cycle. Without proper change management, the iteration can go into loop or lose the the focus. So for any agile methodology, the PM and the team should be very focussed and well aware of what they are doing.

I don't know any company where Agile is implemented as it's meant to be. If you have a bit of a common sense, clue and experience, you can always build the SDLC in the best way for your organization, and you don't need any hardcoded methodology. On the flip side, Agile is just another fashionable theory, like CMMI and others, which could be completely abused by a wrong people. That's why the biggest limitation of Agile is ... HUMAN FACTOR.

Agile emphasizes that face-to-face, spontaneous conversation is the best form of communication. While we can certainly agree on the benefits of this form of communication, it severely limits agile applicability. Moreover, this agile principle extends beyond the development team since other stakeholders such as business analysts are required to be collocated.

So when a team member has a doubt in a use case for that matter that they can go and clarify that doubt with the higher official, and then for the effective stakeholder participation, and to involve them in the same office space is rather difficult, and this is a limitation to me, as effective stakeholder participation is very important in agile applications. So there is a limit of office space where agile was not in picture before it is just that now everybody wants to be agile.