Am I allowed to have “incomplete” aggregates in DDD?

Question

DDD states that you should only ever access entities through their aggregate root. So say for instance that you have an aggregate root X which potentially has a lot of

Answer 1

I consider an aggregate root with a lot of child entities to be a code smell, or a DDD smell if you will. :-) Generally I look at two options.

1. Split your aggregate into many smaller aggregates. This means that my original design was not optimal and I need to identify some new entities.
2. Split your domain into multiple bounded contexts. This means that there are specific sets of scenarios that use a common subset of the entities in the aggregate, while there are other sets of scenarios that use a different subset.