A big misconception-Agile Methodology involves no planning

When you study about Agile, in the initial stages it seems that agile does not include any planning. This misconception generally relates to lack of understanding of agile approach. Most agile team spend as much, if not more, time planning their projects. The difference is that this planning effort is spread throughout an entire project as opposed to being compressed into the beginning of the project. As opposed to extensive, upfront planning, agile development simply follows an incremental approach to planning, which allows for initially planning at high level and iteratively planning at lower levels as more and more knowledge is gained.
If we look at the actual results of the traditional project plans, detailed, task based project plans created at the beginning of software project oftentimes quickly fall out of sync with the technical and business realities of a project. Overtime, significant energy is expended in reconciling the original plans to these current realities. On the other hand, agile development accepts this volatility and instead replaces detailed upfront planning with “continuous planning”
Given that the technology, requirements, business demands, people, issues, risks etc are almost in flux in virtually all software projects, this type of continuous planning approach provides the team with the necessary process-based ammunition to much more easily and efficiently adapt to change. In addition, teams are also able to incrementally optimise their plans as new information emerges.