Agile & Waterfall are two sides of the exact same Coin, and are equally good or bad.
Agile enthusiasts enjoy lambasting waterfall while espousing “Agile”, however the two techniques are exactly the same.
“Waterfall” is basically a Strategic method of attaining goals, and “Agile” is basically a Tactical method for achieving goals.
Both are equally limited; strategy without tactics is ineffective, and tactics without strategy are especially ineffective, especially over a longer term.
One thing that amazes me is that some startups still consider offshoring a cost saving option. Offshoring will almost certainly guarantee that your first implementation will be a failure and a huge amount of time and money will be wasted. The notion that some people still think offshoring will lead to cost savings means they simply haven’t tried offshoring before.
Even sillier is venture capital boards who encourage their young companies to offshore rather than hire US Based developers.
Often times, applications are created with an emphasis being placed on shortness of development time; performance is not looked at until fairly late in the game, and at that point rectifying the situation can and often does prove costly in terms of resources.
Even more importantly, little thought is often given to the underlying data structures used by the application, which often have considerable performance ramifications down the road.
