An enterprise perspective of software offshoring

Enterprises engaged in software offshoring are reticent about their involvements. This paper presents a view of software offshoring from an enterprise perspective based on the author's extensive globalization experience. It addresses the wide spread fear of decline of software development in developed countries due to offshoring by presenting a case study of a large scale software development offshored to China. Aspects include motivation, benefits, risks, decision making, requirements, architecture, process management, project management, and security. The case study shows that offshoring helped to enhance market, increase capacity, access to special skills while most of the software engineering roles were kept in the developed countries. The reader may also get a glimpse of the software skills valued by an enterprise. The paper concludes with what worked and what did not work in the case study.