Modelling software development across time zones

Abstract

Economic factors and the World Wide Web are turning software usage and its development into global activities. Many benefits accrue from global development not least from the opportunity to reduce time-to-market through ‘around the clock’ working.This paper identified some of the factors and constraints that influence time-to-market when software is developed across time zones. It describes a model of the relationships between development time and the factors and overheads associated with such a pattern of work. The paper also reports on a small-scale empirical study of software development across time zones and presents some lessons learned and conclusions drawn from the theoretical and empirical work carried out.