Challenges in the Follow-the-Sun strategy: How to alleviate them.

Nowadays, the globalization process is emerging and creating huge challenges for the software engineering area, making thedevelopment more distributed and global. Seeking for competitive advantages, as cost reduction and productivity gain,companies spread their development operations to low coasts countries. However, challenges related to the distributedsoftware development are important. Among these challenges is the time zone difference, which can also be faced as anadvantage, using the follow-the-sun strategy. Thus, this paper’s objective is to identify the challenges related to the followthe-sun strategy, and show how to alleviate them. This study concludes that the FTS’s main challenges are during the workhandoffs. Yet, this paper presents a feature to lighten these difficulties during the development phase from the softwaredevelopment life cycle