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. Ideally, the work days in these time zones overlap such that when one site ends their day, the next one starts.
FTS has the potential to significantly increase the total development time per day (as viewed from the perspective of a single time zone): with two sites the development time can increase to up to 16 hours, or up to 24 hours if there are three sites, reducing the development duration by as much as 67%.
It is not commonly practiced in industry and has few documented cases where it is applied successfully. This is likely because of its uncommon requirements, leading to a lack of knowledge on how to successfully apply FTS in practice.
History
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. The team was spread out across five sites around the globe. Unfortunately, in this case FTS was unsuccessful because it was uncommon to hand off the software artifacts daily.
Two other cases of FTS at IBM have been documented by Treinen and Miller-Frost. The first team was spread out across a site in the United States and a site in Australia. FTS was successful for this team. The second team was spread out across a site in the United States and a site in India. In this case FTS was unsuccessful because of miscommunication, time zone issues and cultural differences.
Principles
FTS is based on the following four principles: The main objective is the reduction of development duration / time to market. Production sites are many time zones apart. There is always one and only one site that owns and works on the project. Handoffs are conducted daily at the end of each shift. The next production site is several time zones west.
Common misconceptions
An important step in defining FTS is to disambiguate it from other globally distributed configurations to clearly state what FTS is not. The following four types of similar globally distributed configurations are not FTS: Global knowledge work is defined as geographically dispersed knowledge workers working collaboratively from multiple locations. This is not FTS because there are no handoffs. 24/7 service. In this configuration work is distributed to workers who are available at that time. It is focused on availability and the workers have little dependency, whereas FTS is focused on duration reductions and requires dependencies between the different sites in order to perform the daily handoffs. 24-hour manufacturing. This configuration focuses on making shifts fully optimize expensive resources that could not produce more by increasing the number of employees per shift. However, this driver of reducing the resource cost is not the driver of FTS. Collocated multi shifts. In contrast to FTS this configuration chooses one location where labor is cheap and runs multiple eight-hour shifts concurrently.
Difficulties
FTS's largest strength, spreading the development over multiple time zones, is simultaneously its largest weakness. Its distributed workflow is more complex to implement due to cultural and technical differences as well as the differences in time making coordination and communication challenging.
The main reason why FTS is difficult to implement is because the handoffs are an essential element that is hard to get right. The largest factor causing this difficulty is poor communication.
There are few documented cases of companies successfully applying FTS. Some companies have claimed to successfully implement FTS but these companies did not practice the daily handoffs. However, a limited amount of successful applications of FTS that did include daily handoffs of artefacts, using a distributed-concurrent model, were found by Cameron.
Recent studies on FTS have moved to mathematical modeling of FTS. The research is focused on the issue of speed and the issues around the handoffs.