Software startups operate under various uncertainties and the demand on their ability to deal with change is high. Agile methods are considered a suitable and viable development approach for them. However, the competing needs for speed and quality may render certain agile practices less suitable than others in the startup context. The adoption of agile practices can be further complicated in software startups that adopt the Lean Startup approach. To make the best of agile practices, it is necessary to first understand whether and how they are used in software startups. This study targets at a better understanding of the use of agile practices in software startups, with a particular focus on lean startups. Based on a large survey of 1526 software startups, we examined the use of five agile practices, including quality related (regular refactoring and test first), speed related (frequent release and agile planning) and communication practice (daily standup meeting). The findings show that speed related agile practices are used to a greater extent in comparison to quality practices. Daily standup meeting is least used. Software startups who adopt the Lean Startup approach do not sacrifice quality for speed more than other startups do.

Software startups have emerged as an interesting multiper-spective research area. Inspired by Lean Startup, a startup journey can be viewed as a series of experiments that validate a set of business hy-potheses an entrepreneurial team make explicitly or inexplicitly about their startup. It is little known about how startups evolve through busi-ness hypothesis testing. This study proposes a novel approach to look at the startup evolution as a Minimum Viable Product(MVP) creat-ing process. We identified relationships among business hypotheses and MVPs via ethnography and post-mortem analysis in two software star-tups. We observe that the relationship between hypotheses and MVPs is incomplete and non-linear in these two startups. We also find that entrepreneurs do learn from testing their hypotheses. However, there are hypotheses not tested by MVPs and vice versa, MVPs not related to any business hypothesis. The approach we proposed visualizes the flow of entrepreneurial knowledge across pivots via MVPs.

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One essential prerequisite for successful agile retrospective sessions is to accomplish a psychologically safe environment. Creating a psychologically safe environment for the co-located team is challenging. Further, it becomes more demanding with online agile retrospective teams. Literature sheds little light on creating a psychologically safe online environment for conducting agile retrospectives. Our study aims at addressing this knowledge gap and asks the research question: how does the usage of online tools influence psychological safety in online agile retrospectives? A single case study was conducted with a major software company’s Research and Development team. We analysed a recorded online retrospective session of the team to identify patterns of the usage of online tools associated with the online meeting platform they used and how that usage influenced the psychological safety level of the team. Our findings show that retrospective participants are psychologically safe if they share opinions, make mistakes, raise a problem, ask questions, and show consent using online tools. Our study contributes online tools that influence psychological safety factors, corresponding levels and behaviours.

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