Software Quality Practices in Growing Startups: A Qualitative Study

Startups arise in environments of extreme uncertainty, with few resources and the need to scale quickly. In the growth phase, they still need agility, but they tend to concern more with software quality and the development process by having more human and financial resources. Studying the factors that lead startups in the growth phase to seek quality in their processes can help new startups anticipate implementing quality practices. In this paper, we aim to identify how startups adopt quality practices in the growth phase. We carried out a multiple case study with four growth phase startups. We applied qualitative analysis techniques to summarize the findings. The studied startups adopt limited quality practices and are influenced by the development team's maturity level, organizational culture, and experience. Furthermore, they tend to be reactive towards quality, solving the problems when they impact their product, business, customer, or when technical debt can no longer be managed. The findings are relevant to support stabilizing and growing startups to define actions to improve the quality of their processes and products. Besides, they suggest that growth phase startups begin a process of change in the organizational culture concerning quality, adopting the behavior of mature companies as soon as they get more human and financial resources.