Being unique in their specific approaches each of Agile methodologies shares the common idea of aligning programmers and business users more closely together to build the right product faster. This is especially important to IT outsourcing industry as usually there is a lack of communication between customer and service provider.
In this way Agile promotes more direct and face-to-face communication and collaboration between two teams with customer side engaged in the product building.
Yet this might be difficult to achieve in long-distance engagements, where far-travels, time-zone and cultural differences might hamper collaboration and coherence between the teams.
Solution?
Well some outsourcing practitioners say “one can perceive Nearshore and Agile as two core elements of a certain formula to effective software development.”
In this formula Agile is responsible for the rapid delivery of business value and smooth adoption to changing requirements through the better alignment between programmers and business users, while nearshore chemicals, namely proximity, cultural and business language constructs are actually ensure that alignment between the teams.
What is your insight? Is distance still matter in today's technology-enabled world? And what is your take on combining Agile + Nearshore as well as comparing Agile to traditional (non-iterative) methodologies?
Please share your insight on these questions here or in LinkedIn
The overview of the study prepared on this topic might be founded in our previous article "Agile and Nearshore - Formula for Successful Software Development".
Thanks!
