Follow-the-sun

Follow-the-sun (FTS), a sub-field of globally distributed software engineering (GDSE), is a type of global knowledge workflow designed in order to reduce the time to market, in which the knowledge product is owned and advanced by a production site in one time zone and handed off at the end of their work day to the next production site that is several time zones west to continue that work.

Follow-the-sun can be traced back to the mid-1990s where IBM had the first global software team which was specifically set up to take advantages of FTS.

In this case FTS was unsuccessful because of miscommunication, time zone issues and cultural differences.

[3][6] However, a limited amount of successful applications of FTS that did include daily handoffs of artefacts, using a distributed-concurrent model,[2] were found by Cameron.

It is of great importance to select and adapt a methodology for the daily handoffs[1][13] e.g. using agile software development or the waterfall model.

Additionally, technologies like conference video, emails and telephone calls are easy to implement and allow companies to perform synchronous and asynchronous communication between teams and works well in an agile environment.