Assigning tasks in a 24-hour software development model

With the advent of globalization and the Internet, the concept of global software development is gaining ground. The global development model opens up the possibility of 24-hour software development by effectively utilizing the time zone differences. To harness the potential of the 24-hour software development model for reducing the overall development time, a key issue is the allocation of project tasks to the resources in the distributed team. In this paper, we examine this issue of task allocation in order to minimize the completion time of a project. We discuss a model for distributed team across time-zones and propose a task allocation algorithm for the same. We apply the approach on tasks of a few synthetic projects and two real projects and show that there is a potential to reduce the project duration as well as improve the resource utilization through 24-hour development.