Empirical evidence in follow the sun software development: a systematic mapping study

Context: Follow the Sun (FTS) development is a special case of Global Software Development. It is ap- plied in the context of global projects to reduce the software development life-cycle duration. A number of studies have attempted to aggregate a better understanding of FTS development, but it is still an im- mature research area. Objective: This paper aims to investigate the existing empirical evidence about FTS research with a focus on identifying what research has been conducted in the area and which results have been obtained. Method: To achieve this goal, we performed a systematic mapping study to answer our research ques- tions: “Which FTS studies have been published in the literature?”and “What empirical support is pro- vided for them? ”We investigated papers published between 1990 and 2017. The synthesis was made through classifying the papers into different categories (research topics, research methods, conferences and journals venues for FTS research, and countries involved in FTS research). Results: We selected 57 papers using a predefined search strategy. The majority of the papers discussing FTS were published in the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE). The main research topic addressed is processes and organization development for FTS. Case studies combined with the interview as a research sub-method is adopted in the most studies performed in FTS. The majority of the existing research and the most active researchers in this topic are from the United States and Brazil. However, India and the United States are the countries that appear most often in the studies conducted to investigate FTS. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that FTS software development is an up-to-date research topic in Soft- ware Engineering. However, little information about FTS has been published over the last few years. The emergent need in this research is the development of evaluation research for testing FTS feasibility and effectiveness in practice

A feasibility study of follow-the-sun software development for GSD projects

Follow-the-sun (FTS) is a strategy for Global Software Development (GSD) where you 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. Companies have tried to implement FTS, but have abandoned it after some point because of the difficulty to put it into practice. Consequently, there are few documented industry successes. The lack of FTS experience in the software industry is observed as the main barrier for its adoption. For this reason, we performed a study applying FTS to develop a software project. Our goal was to examine the feasibility and outcomes of FTS. In this paper, we present the experience report describing best practices and solutions performed to overcome the challenges we found

NaPiRE Data Set 2014

Data from the NaPiRE run 2013 in 10 countries. The data set includes: (1) codebooks and instrumentation, (2) complete data export, and the results of the (3) manual coding sheets. Further data, analysis scripts, or explanations upon request. Further information on the overall project can be taken from the website www.re-survey.org<div><br></div