Waterfall versus Agile Methodology: Why Agile practice makes for perfect collaboration with offshore developers

Team collaboration can be a challenge under any circumstances. Team collaboration with offshore developers a continent or a time zone away requires partnership and trust.

For this, Agile methodology is fast becoming the industry standard for offshore collaboration, preferred over Waterfall methodology—and it’s easy to understand why. For offshore developers, Agile provides a development framework that’s more adaptable than defined—and more focused on creating working software than it is on perfecting process.

With Agile development, individuals and interactions are more valued than processes are. Developers are empowered to make decisions and are also accountable for the outcomes of their actions. They have a real stake in the development end game, so they are more motivated to succeed. And that results in better efforts that add more value.

Many offshore developers in China and India are trained in the Waterfall model of software development, which favors planning and execution that’s fixed and predefined rather than adaptable. Only the team leaders are empowered to make decisions—and there’s no project manager or supervisor to keep developers on task.

With Waterfall methodology, developers take direction and accept the information they are given. In this way, it’s easy to find Waterfall programmers blindly willing to write code without being concerned about the context for which it is being developed. I’ve seen many offshore development projects fail because of engagement models like this that are too narrowly focused and lack the structure on which to build a true partnership.

Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed many incidents of clients asking for workable software, only to be given software that was never tested—turning the client into the tester by default. That’s not partnership.

Offshore collaboration can and should be as seamless as in-house collaboration. High-bandwidth Internet technology gives us the anytime, anywhere communications that we need. As more offshore developers like Shinetech become trained and committed to Agile development, we gain access to a larger pool of Agile developers who have a big-picture, business view of software development—and the collaboration skills that Waterfall developers are lacking.