Follow the Sun (FTS), a sub-field of globally distributed software engineering (GDSE), is a type of global knowledge workflow designed in order to reduce the time to market, in which the knowledge product is owned and advanced by a production site in one time zone and handed off at the end of their work day to the next production site that is several time zones west to continue that work. Ideally, the work days in these time zones overlap such that when one site ends their day, the next one starts. FTS has the potential to significantly increase the total development time per day (as viewed from the perspective of a single time zone): with two sites the development time can increase to up to 16 hours, or up to 24 hours if there are three sites, reducing the development duration by as much as 67%. It is not commonly practiced in industry and has few documented cases where it is applied successfully. This is likely because of its uncommon requirements, leading to a lack of knowledge on how to successfully apply FTS in practice. History Follow the Sun can be traced back to the mid-1990s where IBM had the first global software team which was specifically set up to take advantages of FTS. The team was spread out across five sites around the globe. Unfortunately, in this case FTS was unsuccessful because it was uncommon to hand off the software artifacts daily. Two other cases of FTS at IBM have been documented by Treinen and Miller-Frost. The first team was spread out across a site in the United States and a site in Australia. FTS was successful for this team. The second team was spread out across a site in the United States and a site in India. In this case FTS was unsuccessful because of miscommunication, time zone issues and cultural differences. Principles FTS is based on the following four principles: The main objective is the reduction of development duration / time to market. Production sites are many time zones apart. There is always one and only one site that owns and works on the project. Handoffs are conducted daily at the end of each shift. The next production site is several time zones west. Common misconceptions An important step in defining FTS is to disambiguate it from other globally distributed configurations to clearly state what FTS is