Wrote an article a few days back and posted it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/nickmalik/articles/243442.aspx
This article is directly aimed at folks who send software out to an outsource agency or overseas development shop, where the code is written and delivered back to you. The article contains specific advice for how your RFP should read, or what your statement of work should say, to encourage the outsourcing vendor to use agile development methods instead of a waterfall software development lifecycle (SDLC), which nearly always fails.
Perhaps you should encourage that sort of thing (waterfall w/ outsourcing) in an effort to keep software work on a personal and local level, as the failures will convince people that contracting overseas is too difficult, and they should hire their neighbors ^_^
That’s funny.
To answer a joke with a serious response is probably pretty dumb, but I’m going to do it anyway because there’s a point here…
The overseas partners that we are using are less inclined to use waterfall than our locally based partners. Perhaps this is because they are younger, or because they’ve had to be more agile to get the business.
Either way, waterfall works against the local folks more than our outsourcing partners in India and China. It also spends my company’s money. I am doing no one any favors that way.