software startups

Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges relevant for software engineering research. This paper's research agenda focuses on software engineering in startups, identifying, in particular, 70+ research questions in the areas of supporting startup engineering activities, startup evolution models and patterns, ecosystems and innovation hubs, human aspects in software startups, applying startup concepts in non-startup environments, and methodologies and theories for startup research. We connect and motivate this research agenda with past studies in software startup research, while pointing out possible future directions. While all authors of this research agenda have their main background in Software Engineering or Computer Science, their interest in software startups broadens the perspective to the challenges, but also to the opportunities that emerge from multidisciplinary research. Our audience is therefore primarily software engineering researchers, even though we aim at stimulating collaborations and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We believe that with this research agenda we cover a wide spectrum of the software startup industry current needs.

Agile software development methodologies consist of a set of software practices that can help organizations to produce products faster and deliver what customers want. Despite the benefits they gain from adopting agile practice, organizations could maximize the benefits gained by adopting correlated practices. There is a lack of study on the identification of clusters of independent practices. This paper focuses on identifying clusters of agile practices in software startups in Saudi Arabia. The study was conducted using a questionnaire with 76 software practitioners from software startups in Saudi Arabia. In this paper, 20 agile practices were analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis. The analysis generated four clusters: Each was associated with a list of practices. These clusters can be used as a guide for agile method tailoring that helps to identify the interrelationship between different agile practices. The clusters were labeled as project management, quality assurance, team communication, and incremental and iterative clusters. The results can be used to study the co-dependence of agile practices in depth. Moreover, the study can help adopters from similar domains as well as companies with limited resources and experience frequent changes in requirements to adopt these agile practice clusters.

[Context] The software startups could continuously innovate business model value proposition by involving freelancers as a source of innovative ideas (that enhance customer perceived value) and as experts for implementing the innovative ideas (by undertaking software engineering tasks). Startups employ one of three strategies for associating with freelancers i.e., task based (association ends with completion of the outsourced task), panel based (outsourcing task to a panel of freelancers associated with startup), or hybrid. Uncertainties, terminology issues, high technical debt, lack of documentation, lack of systematic decision making processes, lack of resources, lack of brand values, need for the continuous involvement of the freelancer to incorporate continuous validated learnings, merging freelancer perspectives, and deciding the level of their involvement in individual requirement engineering (or value proposition innovation) activities, are the main inhibitors for associations with freelancers. The availability of good freelancers and their long term and continuous commitments are necessary requirements for value proposition innovation. The theory about freelancer association with the software startups is extended by studying the real practices of startups, which successfully involved freelancers for value proposition innovation by capturing innovative ideas and acquiring the freelancer's skills to implement those ideas. [Objectives] The objective of this paper is to explain the strategies adopted by the software startups to foster value proposition innovation by continuously involving the freelancers and the way they overcome the challenges arising because of the associations. The findings are driven by the study of real practices of startups that proved to be successful in the market by involving freelancers and continuous innovations leading to increased market shares. [Method] This paper performs empirical studies through case studies of three software startups located in Italy, France, and India, which are at the verge of being transforming into big companies, with large market share. The current practices highlighting the successful way of executing freelancing association strategies for value proposition innovation and the way to overcome the arising challenges are reported. The findings are also compared with those of two young startups based in Switzerland and India, to bring useful lessons for the young startups. The case study results are validated by employees from the studied startups (both those who participated in data collection and those who did not). [Results] The results indicate that freelancer involvement during value proposition activities, which is the core business operation, is beneficial to the both freelancers and the startups. Startup teams could reduce the development costs, shorten time to market, and increase customer satisfaction (by providing features addressing real market needs) by correctly involving the freelancers uniformly across value proposition activities. The startups could manage innovation with small teams (compared to human resources in companies) if done jointly with the freelancers, that helps the team members to learn new skills, upgrade their skills, and learn new perspectives about their markets. Business impacts due to freelancer involvement are stronger if the level of freelancer involvement across various value proposition activities is higher Sustainability 2020, 12, 8922 2 of 35 compared to their involvement across few activities only. The studied startups are not completely dependent on the freelancers but the freelancer's perspectives and skills are valued as a rich source of market success. Freelancer involvement is taken as an opportunity to gain access to global market perspectives, which otherwise would be effortful for in-house teams to collect. In addition, they resolve technical debt, are a source of upgrading skills for undertaking future innovation, and help reaching customers for marketing (promoting product and gaining access to the feedbacks). Overall, the value proposition innovation in the studied startups have different levels of involvement of the freelancers but these startups have reported positive impacts on the business in terms of development cost reductions, shorten time to market, and high customer satisfaction (measured on early attainment of product/market fit and fast growth thereafter). The case study results are validated by the startup employees (member checking). The responses collected are analysed using box plots, which shows a higher level of result agreements among the employees.

The dissipation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has already taken on pandemic proportions, affecting over 100 countries in a couple of weeks. The evolution of the disease and its economic impact is highly uncertain, which brings challenges for newly created software companies. Software startups are companies that create innovative software products and services in a dynamic and fast-growing market. Agile Software Methods aims to enable startups in responding to uncertainty caused by Covid-19. This paper investigates the impact of Covid-19 in a real software startup context to understand how they have reacted against uncertainties caused by Covid-19. As a research methodology, action research within Di2Win, a Brazilian software startup, has been applied. The study was carried out throughout six sprints, during the quarantine. Practices employed to mitigate threats while simultaneously allowing teams to remain open to opportunities and challenges are detailed. This paper shares lessons learned that could help agile software startups improve their way of work in an uncertain environment caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This research paper explores the involvement of freelancers in requirement engineering activities to continuously innovating the value propositions and utilizing their expertise in various requirement engineering tasks. This paper reports the case study conducted with the startups that involve freelancers for the requirement engineering activities. The findings are then compared with the literature to explore the freelancer supported requirement engineering domain. Results indicate that the freelancers could help innovate value proposition by providing different perspectives of the global segments and also expertise in executing requirement engineering activities. The freelancers have varying levels of involvement in requirement engineering activities depending on on startup contexts and is highly challenged by various inhibitors. The inhibitors include difficulty to select freelancers optimally, ensuring their long term association for continuous rework arising because of continuous learnings in the market, building trust, mechanism to integrate their perspective, establishing communication, negotiations and strategic pricings. However, there is a need to optimally establish the freelancer involvement from beginning of the startup life cycle with a promise for long term benefits in exchange for their trustworthy and accurate perspectives, which is harder to get by involving crowds of customers due to resource limitations. Further research is required to investigate how freelancers could represent the samples of globally distributed customer segments as input source of information on one side and on another side become startup team representatives to establish direct interactions with global customer segments.