Distributed Teams

Co-location vs. distributed teams

Co-location with the customer is the best choice for an Agile project. However, there are situations where this is impossible. Various organizations prefer to use offshore construction. The developers and testers can be located anywhere in the world.

There are different arguments for using offshore development. One argument is that there are insufficient local people with the necessary skills. It’s then plausible to search for those developers elsewhere.

In addition, there’s the assumption that offshore development is cheaper. Based purely on the hourly rates, this seems realistic. That said, the inevitable overhead and complex communication take away part of this advantage in offshore scenarios. Added to the fact that the domain of many projects is complex and full of local laws and regulations, this complicates offshore outsourcing enormously.

In the past, Waterfall was chosen unanimously for offshore projects. This seems easier. Analysis and design are done locally, and once they’re ready, the rest of the project is outsourced to an offshore location. Nonetheless, it’s striking that, in offshore Waterfall projects, the same problems arise as in local Waterfall projects.

The project’s delivery date is delayed, it goes over budget, and the delivered ...