An exploratory empirical study of developing software across time zones

Market forces and an increasingly reliable world-wide communications network have made geographically distributed software engineering a reality. Global software development enables businesses to respond more easily and more quickly to global market opportunities and to improve product and service quality. One of the many potential benefits of global development is a reduction in development time through the adoption of an ‘around the clock’ working practice. This paper introduces a sequential collaborative software engineering process involving shift working across time zones and describes an exploratory empirical study of this working pattern involving the implementation of a small-scale software system. The paper reports on the organisation of the study and on the results obtained through questionnaires, observations and measurements.