Follow-the-sun

src: i.ytimg.com

Follow the Sun (FTS), a globally distributed software engineering subfield (GDSE), is a global knowledge workflow designed to reduce time to market, where knowledge products are owned and promoted by the site production in a time zone and submitted at the end of their working day to the next production site that some western time zone to continue the work. Ideally, the working days in this time zone overlap so that when one site ends their day, the next begins.

FTS has the potential to significantly increase the total development time per day (as viewed from a single time zone perspective): with two development time sites up to 16 hours, or up to 24 hours if there are three sites, reducing the development duration by 67%.

This is not commonly practiced in the industry and has several documented cases in which it is successfully applied. This may be due to its unusual requirements, leading to a lack of knowledge about how to successfully implement FTS in practice.

Video Follow-the-sun

History

Follow the Sun can be traced back to the mid-1990s where IBM has the first global software team specifically created to take advantage of FTS. The team is spread across five sites around the world. Unfortunately, in this case FTS did not work because it is not unusual to submit software artifacts every day.

Two other FTS cases at IBM have been documented by Treinen and Miller-Frost. The first team is scattered on a site in the United States and a site in Australia. FTS managed for this team. The second team is spread on a site in the United States and a site in India. In this case the FTS was unsuccessful due to miscommunication, time zone issues and cultural differences.

Maps Follow-the-sun

Principles

FTS is based on the following four principles:

1. The ultimate goal is to reduce the duration of development/time to market.
2. The production site has many separate time zones.
3. There is always one and only one site that owns and works on the project.
4. Handoff is done daily at each end of shift. The next production site is some time zone to the west.

Common misconceptions

An important step in defining FTS is to disqualify it from other global distributed configurations to state clearly what FTS does not. The following four types of distributed global configuration are similarly not FTS:

• The work of global knowledge is defined as geographically dispersed workers working collaboratively from multiple locations. This is not FTS because there is no handoff.
• 24/7 service. In this configuration work is distributed to the workers available at that time. It is focused on availability and workers have little dependency, while FTS is focused on reducing duration and requires dependency between different sites to do daily handoff.
• manufacturing 24 hours. This configuration focuses on making shifts fully optimize the expensive resources that can not generate more by increasing the number of employees per shift. However, the driver reduces the cost of this resource is not the driver of the FTS.
• Multi-circle shift. Unlike the FTS, this configuration selects one location where labor is cheap and runs multiple shifts of eight hours simultaneously.

src: follow-the-sun.github.io

Difficulty

The greatest strength of FTS, spreading development through multiple time zones, is simultaneously its biggest weakness. Distributed workflows are more complex to implement due to cultural and technical differences as well as time differences making coordination and communication challenging.

The main reason why FTS is difficult to implement is because handoffs are important elements that are difficult to get right. The biggest factor causing this difficulty is poor communication.

There are several cases of documented companies successfully implementing FTS. Some companies claim to successfully implement FTS. However, these companies do not practice daily handoff. A number of successful FTS applications were discovered by Cameron.

Recent studies on FTS have moved on to FTS mathematical modeling. Research is focused on the problem of speed and handoffs issues.

src: static1.squarespace.com

Method

Because FTS is a sub-field of GDSE, the same agile software development methodology that found working well in GDSE works well with FTS. Specifically, Carmel et al. (2009) argues that agile software development methodologies help the FTS principles because they:

1. supports daily handoff. Ongoing integration and automatic integration of source code allow each site to work within their own codebase during their business day, while integration maintains an updated, testable code for future use.
2. deals with communication. The agile methodology emphasizes communication. They specifically emphasize face-to-face communication, which can be done in one site. Because FTS aims to reduce inter site communication, face-to-face aspects are not a major obstacle to the overall application of agile development methodologies.
3. collaborate and collaborate. Because FTS requires more collaboration and cooperation, this emphasis is very useful.

Challenges

Kroll et al. (2013) has been researching papers published between 1990 and 2012 and found 36 best practices and 17 challenges for FTS. Challenges are grouped into three categories: coordination, communication, and culture. These challenges must be overcome to implement the FTS successfully.

Coordinate

• Time zone differences reduce opportunities for real-time collaboration. Team members must be flexible to achieve overlap with long-distance coworkers. Limited overlaps and delays in responses have a negative impact on coordination.
• The daily handoff cycle or submit work-in-progress is a FTS requirement because without it time to market can not be reduced.
• Geographic dispersion
• Estimated cost
• Loss of teamness
• Number of sites
• Coordinate details
• Managerial difficulties
• Technical platforms

Communications

• Loss of communication richness/face-to-face communication
• Difficulties in the diversity of social culture
• Sync communication
• Language differences
• Technical difficulties
• Manage religious or national holidays.

Culture

• Cultural differences
• Different technical backgrounds

Best practices

It is important to select and customize the methodology for daily handoffs eg using agile software development or waterfall models.

The best practices identified are the use of agile methods and the use of technology to develop FTS activities. Agile supports daily handoff which is an important challenge in FTS. Management tools can be used to estimate and plan schedules, manage sprints and track progress. In addition, technologies such as video conferencing, email and phone calls are easy to implement and allow companies to sync and asynchronous communication between teams and work well in a vivacious environment.

Unfortunately, there is no best best practice because FTS can be applied in various ways.

src: 1.bp.blogspot.com

Follow the Moon

The related concept is follow-the-moon , which schedules work that should be done specifically during local curfews to, for example, save data center costs by using cheaper night's electricity or backup processing power.

src: wallpaperstock.net

Other terms

• 24 hour development
• development all the time

src: 1.bp.blogspot.com

See also

• It's time to market

src: www.comolasgrecas.com

Notes and references

src: i1.wp.com

External links

• Example usage in industry - IT support

Source of the article : Wikipedia