Abstract
Software startups are software-intensive early-stage companies that have high growth rates. Their time to market is often regarded as short and decisive in establishing their product/service success, thus leading to short-cuts in software engineering decisions. High accumulation of the technical debt at early stages has been documented from previous investigations. How startups rapidly becoming grownups perceive technical debt, make the primary goal of our study. We conducted semi-structured interviews with six technical and executive officers from five software startups, selected using purposive sampling. We identified four critical perceptions (managing, accepting, avoiding, ignoring technical debt) which permit them to make technical debt trade-offs. We also found that no one size fits all. Startups need to make deliberate educated decisions on how to use technical debt in their advantage.
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Notes
- 1.
Metaphoric concept of TD has been first introduced by Ward Cunningham [4] in 1992.
- 2.
Grownups are well established companies with market revenue being primary source of income.
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Acknowledgement
This work was funded by the Norwegian Research Council under the project IPIT Project Number: 274816. Many thanks to Prof. Letizia Jaccheri, for the support as project leader.
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Cico, O. (2019). Technical Debt Trade-Off - Experiences from Software Startups Becoming Grownups. In: Hyrynsalmi, S., Suoranta, M., Nguyen-Duc, A., Tyrväinen, P., Abrahamsson, P. (eds) Software Business. ICSOB 2019. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 370. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33742-1_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33742-1_34
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