A view on the state of software engineering practice: experience from Egypt

An excerpt from Thomas Friedman's famous book The World Is Flat, "When developing countries start thinking about the challenge of flatism...It has to ask itself," "To what extent is my country advancing or being left behind by the flattening of the world, and to what extent is it adapting to and taking advantage of all the new platforms for collaborations and competition?" is vividly describing the appeal of many developing countries in entering the software industry. With the globalization of crafting software and its services, the software industry is seen as a lucrative economic growth opportunity. Unlike other industrial investments, the software industry is convenient to developing countries for its low-cost of establishment. All is needed is an affordable real estate rental, a bunch of PCs, and a few skilled workers to get the business running. The globalization of the software industry with attention given to accessing the right skills no matter where and reducing costs through cheap labor is even a realization to those countries ambitions to remedy part of their economic challenges. India preceded with utilizing such potential and made good use of such globalization, or flatism, of the software industry; positioning itself as a successful model to those nations aspiring to compete globally and establish economic growth.

Egypt is no exception from this ambition. Geographically positioned in proximity to Europe at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia and with access to abundant low wage talent pool of multilingual technical graduates annually are all factors that made it conceivable that Egypt can compete in the global industry of software. However, such entrance into competition, notably with India as well as other Middle Eastern countries, have shaped trends in the practices of software engineering in Egypt as well as it did emerge several challenges that Egypt should learn to remedy if it wants to stay competitive in the global software industry. This paper attempts to shed light on salient current software engineering practices and related challenges that would be affecting Egypt's progress and competitive edge. In laying a foundation to such brief survey of practices, this paper also overviews major cornerstones that gave rise to the establishment and support of such industry in Egypt.