Context: freelancers and startups could provide each other with promising opportunities that lead to mutual growth, by improving software development metrics, such as cost, time, and quality. Niche skills processed by freelancers could help startups reduce uncertainties associated with developments and markets, with the ability to quickly address market issues (and with higher quality). This requires the associations between freelancers and startup to be long-term, based on trust, and promising agreements driven by motivations (leading to the growth of both parties). Freelancers could help startups foster innovations and undertake software development tasks in better ways than conducted in-house, if they are selected using informed decision-making. Objectives: the paper has three objectives, (1) to explore the strategies of startups to outsource software development tasks to freelancers (termed as freelancing association strategies); (2) to identify challenges in such outsourcings; and (3) to identify the impacts of outsourcing tasks to freelancers on overall project metrics. The overall objective is to understand the strategies for involving freelancers in the software development process, throughout the startup lifecycle, and the associated challenges and the impacts that help to foster innovation (to maintain competitive advantages). Method: this paper performs empirical studies through case studies of three software startups located in Italy, France, and India, followed by a survey of 54 freelancers. The results are analyzed and compared in the identification of association models, issues, challenges, and reported results arising because of such associations. The case study results are validated using members checking with the research participants, which shows a higher level of result agreements. Results: the results indicate that the freelancer association strategy is task based, panel based, or a hybrid. The associations are constrained by issues such as deciding pricing, setting deadlines, difficulty in getting good freelancers, quality issues with software artefacts, and efforts to access freelancer work submissions for reward. The associations have a positive impact on software development if there is availability of good freelancers (which lasts long for various tasks). The paper finally provides a freelancing model framework and recommends activities that could result in making the situation beneficial to both parties, and streamline such associations. Fostering innovation in startups is, thus, a trade-off situation, which is limited and supported by many conflicting parameters.

Startups have high failure rates due to their inability to attain a sufficient product/market fit, i.e., delivering a solution that best matches the user needs in the market. Requirement engineering is the activity that could help startup teams identify the value proposition that provides high value to the users and continuously innovate it. The objective of the study is to analyse the state of art of the requirement engineering research in the context of startups, as available in the literature. The analysis of the research area highlights the research trends to achieve two things i.e., (a) predict how much support the startups can get from the literature for enhancing their success rates and (b) identify the research gaps to motivate researchers to conduct future research that could be adoptable in startup contexts. Systematic mapping is conducted on studies extracted from the four bibliographic databases (IEEExplore, ACM, Springerlink and ScienceDirect) and studies extracted by using a forward snowballing approach. Individual studies are coded to yield the classification scheme. Formulated schemes and those already available in literature, were populated with information extracted from the abstracts of the studies. The research is mostly focused on generic requirement engineering and product validation activities. The research is conducted mostly as evaluations (empirical studies) with the outcome of providing theory to the research community. Major underlying motivation of the research is to attain the product/market fit. However, research studies focusing on requirement documentation, prioritization and elicitation are losing focus from 2017, 2018 and 2019, respectively. The literature lacks the studies that reports research solutions which are validated in laboratory settings or in real contexts, experience reports, opinion papers and philosophical papers. The positive side of the finding is that the number of requirement engineering research studies in a startup context have increased in the past five years. At this instant, unfortunately the literature has limited ability to support startups by providing solutions (for instance, research solutions, evidence to support decision makings, best practices, experiences etc.) that are adoptable in their real context. Uniform focus of the researchers across all sub-activities of requirement engineering is required with effort distributed across different research types that supports startups, not only by providing validated solutions but experience reports, opinions, new conceptual frameworks and empirical evidence that can aid their decision making.

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This paper proposes an index to measure the possibilities individuals have to balance their work and life spheres.

[Context] Freelancers could catalyze the software development process by providing their niche skills to generate high quality outputs. They could help companies (including startups) to foster innovations by suggesting creative ideas and providing their expertise in implementing them (for instance, designing solutions, coding solutions etc.). Freelancers could effectively and efficiently work as a virtual member of the software development team. The company must make informed decisions about which task to allot to the freelancer, which freelancer to select, pricing the task, and evaluating the submitted work. On the other hand, the freelancer should make an informed decision about evaluating the monetary value of the task to be charged, trusting the requester, analyzing the skills requirement of the task (finding matches between skill requirement and skills processed), selecting the best task, and maintaining the highest level of reputation. However, the literature does not provide freelancers and the companies the guidelines that support their decision making. However, if freelancers are selected carefully for the most suitable task, the companies will benefit a lot in terms of improved software development metrics. [Objectives] The objective of this paper is to provide the research community the research trends in freelancer-supported software development. This helps to understand that which software development areas have higher concentrations of research efforts, which area has the support of empirical evidence to support management decision makings, and which area requires the research attention. [Method] The systematic study is conducted by planning the mapping protocol, executing the protocol, and reporting the findings using various visualization tools like bar charts and pie charts. The search process was planned to be executed using set of inclusion and exclusion conditions on four bibliographic databases (IEEExplore, Springerlink, Sciencedirect, and ACM digital library). The relevant papers are selected by applying inclusion and exclusion conditions. The google citations of the relevant papers are subject to the inclusion and exclusion conditions again to include the more relevant papers. Finally, the systematic schema was created and populated after analyzing the studies abstracts. [Results] The results indicate the following (a) The research focus is on generic software development (78%) rather on individual life cycle activities. (b) The number of empirical studies is limited (25%). (c) A number of studies proposing solutions and evaluating on live cases in industrial settings are missing from the literature. This is in comparison to the validation approaches (72%) i.e., solutions tested in laboratory settings. (d) At present, the literature has limited ability to provide the software companies (including startups) with the guidelines (in the form of opinions and experience reports) for involving freelancers in the software development process. (e) The reported challenges include Collaboration and Coordination (33%), Developer Recommendation (or selection) (19%), Team Formulation (14%), Task Recommendation (allocation) (14%), Task Decomposition (11%), Privacy and Security (Confidentiality) (11%), Budget Estimation (8%), Recognition (8%), Trust Issues (8%), Market Dynamism (6%), Intellectual Property Issues (6%), Participation of Crowd Worker (6%), and Capacity Utilization (3%). These challenges are highly interactive, and each challenge impacts all other challenges. (e) Recent focus of the researchers (total 7 studies in 2019) is on generic software development handling the collaboration and coordination (3 studies out of 7), Developer recommendation (2 studies out of 7), and task recommendation (2 studies out of 7). [Conclusion] The freelancer-driven software engineering research area has got the attraction of the researchers, but it will take a long time to gain maturity. This puts an urgent call for more empirical studies and evaluation-based solution research that could help companies (including startups) to foster innovations. Further, the research focus should be well distributed among the various development phases to address the unique challenges associated with individual activities. The accurate management of the freelancer in the software development could help companies and startups to foster innovations and remain competitive in the marketplace.