A feasibility study of follow-the-sun software development for GSD projects

Follow-the-sun (FTS) is a strategy for Global Software Development (GSD) where you hand off work at the end of every day from one site to the next, many time zones away, in order to speed up product development. Companies have tried to implement FTS, but have abandoned it after some point because of the difficulty to put it into practice. Consequently, there are few documented industry successes. The lack of FTS experience in the software industry is observed as the main barrier for its adoption. For this reason, we performed a study applying FTS to develop a software project. Our goal was to examine the feasibility and outcomes of FTS. In this paper, we present the experience report describing best practices and solutions performed to overcome the challenges we found.