FTSProc: A Process to Alleviate the Challenges of Projects that Use the Follow-the-Sun Strategy

Searching for competitive advantages as low coast and productivity gains, organizations choose to distribute their software development to other countries with more affordable production costs. Increasingly, projects are being developed in geographically distributed environments, featuring the distributed software development. However, the challenges inherent in this software development environment are significant. Among these challenges is the time zone difference, which can also be tackled as an advantage, through the use of the follow-the-sun development. However, the follow-the-sun strategy presents some challenges, mainly alongside the handoffs. Therefore, this experimental research focuses to present a development process to alleviate the challenges found in project that uses this strategy, focusing in the development phase from the SDLC. Yet, it performs an experiment to evaluate the created process' efficiency. In this experimental process it was found evidences the created process actually alleviate the challenges found in the follow-the-sun strategy.