Argentina's Offshore Software Industry - Opportunities and Challenges

Argentina’s software industry is orders of magnitude smaller than the largest software industries in the world like India’s. However, it has seen impressive growth over the last years, with ratios ranging from 15 to 20% per year since 2003. This is due to several reasons, including time zone compatibility with the US and Europe, resource quality, price competitiveness and active policies from the local governments over the last 8 years. In particular, time zone compatibility has proved to be a significant advantage when using agile methodologies, as frequent interaction between stakeholders and the development teams is needed. In this paper we discuss in detail some of the reasons we believe have made this growth possible, along with some insights on the software engineering processes being used by some of the companies that have positioned themselves successfully in the offshore market. We finish by describing the strategy that is being followed by the government and IT chambers of commerce and associations to make this growth sustainable.