Embracing Technical Debt, from a Startup Company Perspective

Abstract

Software startups are typically under extreme pressure to get to market quickly with limited resources and high uncertainty. This pressure and uncertainty is likely to cause startups to accumulate technical debt as they make decisions that are more focused on the short-term than the long-term health of the codebase. However, most research on technical debt has been focused on more mature software teams, who may have less pressure and, therefore, reason about technical debt very differently than software startups. In this study, we seek to understand the organizational factors that lead to and the benefits and challenges associated with the intentional accumulation of technical debt in software startups. We interviewed 16 professionals involved in seven different software startups. We find that the startup phase, the experience of the developers, software knowledge of the founders, and level of employee growth are some of the organizational factors that influence the intentional accumulation of technical debt. In addition, we find the software startups are typically driven to achieve a "good enough level," and this guides the amount of technical debt that they intentionally accumulate to balance the benefits of speed to market and reduced resources with the challenges of later addressing technical debt.

Technical Debt Trade-Off - Experiences from Software Startups Becoming Grownups

“…Moreover, studies reporting empirical evidence on startup product quality relevance and when TD is commonly revealed from startups in industrial setting [9], help us make research decisions on which startup phases require more attention in managing TD. Besker1 et al [3] also report empirical evidence on how the taking on or embracing of TD is deemed to be an essential option for TSs. The authors also analyze how the TD is accumulated and refactored at different stages of startup development to provide good enough levels of quality.…”

“…Nevertheless, limitations of the study exist and are also mentioned in this section. Many of the previous studies have focused on covering and addressing several startup life cycle phases by unfolding the TD challenges and benefits [3]. In our case, we focus more on a specific moment in time borderline to the transitioning from software startups to grownups.…”

“…Facing Technical Debt 1 (TD), is becoming even more of an urgent need for many software startups [24,9,3]. Empirical evidence on how TD is perceived from software startups is still meager, and the need for empirical evidence is reported from [1].…”

Towards surgically-precise technical debt estimation: early results and research roadmap

“…The growth of TD commonly slows down the development process [2], [13] and software companies need to manage it. Many factors related to unpredictable business or environmental forces internal or external to the company can lead to TD [14], [1].…”

Towards a Holistic Definition of Requirements Debt

“…TD implies suboptimal design or implementation solutions giving a short-term benefit while making changes more costly or even impossible in the medium and long term. Unpredictable business and environmental forces, internal or external to a company, can result in TD which needs to be managed [2], [3].…”