"Follow the Sun" Workflow in Global Software Development

Abstract

Erran CarmEl is a professor in the Information technology Department at the kogod School of business at american university. professor Carmel's area of expertise is globalization of technology work. He studies global software teams, offshoring of information technology, and emergence of software industries around the world. His 1999 book Global Software Teams (published by prentice Hall) is a pioneering book on the topic. His second book, Offshoring Information Technology (coauthored with paul tjia), published in 2005 by Cambridge university press, is used in many global sourcing courses. He has written over 80 articles, reports, and manuscripts. He consults and speaks to industry and professional groups. In 2008-9, while writing this paper, he was the Orkand Chaired professor at the university of Maryland university College. He has been a Visiting professor at Haifa university (Israel) and university College Dublin (Ireland).J. albErto Espinosa is associate professor of Information technology at the kogod School of business at american university. He received his ph.D. in Information Systems from the tepper School of business at Carnegie Mellon university. His research focuses on coordination and performance in global technical projects across global boundaries, particularly across spatial and temporal distances, and coordination in large-scale technical collaboration tasks such as within-enterprise architecture.YaEl DubinskY is affiliated with the Software and Services group at the IbM Haifa research lab (Hrl). She is also a visiting member of the human-computer interaction research group in the Department of Computer and Systems Science at la Sapienza, rome, and for more than ten years has been an instructor of project-based courses in the Department of Computer Science at technion-Israel Institute of technology. Dr. Dubinsky received her b.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science and ph.D. in Science and technology Education from technion, Israel. Her research interests center on software engineering and information systems. She has significant experience guiding agile implementation processes in both industry and academia. She has presented her research at the ICSE (International Conference of Software Engineering), agile, and Xp (Extreme programming) conferences since 2002. Her book Agile Software Engineering, coauthored with Orit Hazzan, was published by Springer in 2008.abstraCt: Follow the sun (FtS) has interesting appeal-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. although the potential effect on "time to market" can be profound, at least conceptually, FtS has enjoyed few documented industry successes because it is acknowledged to be extremely difficult to implement. In order to address this "FtS challenge," we provide here a conceptual foundation and formal definition of FtS. We then analyze the conditions under which FtS can be successful in reducing duration in Downloaded by [Central Michigan University] at 03:05

A Systematic Literature Review of Best Practices and Challenges in Follow-the-Sun Software Development

“…This result makes sense, considering that time zone differences are the main characteristic of FTS projects and daily handoff cycles are used two or three times a day to transfer tasks between sites [1]. In addition, within Coordination, seven more challenges were found in three studies.…”

“…where software development is distributed over 24 work hours per day in order to reduce the overall development time [1]. In FTS, team members are spread across different time zones to achieve a single project outcome [2].…”

“…In FTS, team members are spread across different time zones to achieve a single project outcome [2]. Many companies have tried to implement FTS strategy, but have abandoned it after some point because of the difficulty of putting it into practice [1].…”

“…FOLLOW-THE-SUN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT Follow-the-sun (FTS) is a software development strategy used in the GSD context in order to take advantage of the temporal distance between several production sites located in different time zones [4] [1]. Its main purpose is the reduction of the software development life cycle duration or time-to-market in order to obtain a competitive business advantage [1].…”

Risks to Effective Knowledge Sharing in Agile Software Teams: A Model for Assessing and Mitigating Risks

“…A fundamental concept in agile development is effective sharing of high-quality information, know-how, ideas, suggestions, skills, and expertise among individuals (Ghobadi & D'Ambra, 2013). For example, scrum requires user representatives, product owners, developers and managers to engage in iterative cycles, address development challenges, and explore product opportunities (Nerur & Balijepally, 2007, Carmel et al, 2010, Chakraborty & Sarker, 2010. Several barriers may, however, pose risks to effective knowledge sharing in agile development (Ghobadi & Mathiassen, 2015).…”