Follow-the-sun (FTS) is a subset of Global Software Development (GSD) [8]. It is applied in the context of GSD in order to take advantage of the temporal distance between several production sites located in different time zones [9]. FTS is uniquely focused on speed of development. Its main purpose is the reduction of the software development life cycle duration or time-to-market [3].
FTS does not offer other advantages besides decreasing the duration. It is applied to software projects when a software product needs to be developed quickly and the cost is irrelevant to the client [6].
In FTS software development, as team members are distributed across multiple time zones, organizations can develop software twenty-four hours continuously. Thus, the time reduction may be by 50% if there are two sites and by 67% if there are three sites [8]. Additionally, according to Solingen and Valkema [9], when the number of sites in a daily cycle increases, on average, the overall working speed of the sites also increases.