The Perception and Management of Technical Debt in Software Startups

Apa, Cecilia; Jeronimo, Helvio; Nascimento, Luciana de Cássia Nunes; Vallespir, Diego; Travassos, Guilherme Horta

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35983-6_4

Cited by 8 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The authors argued that TD management can be achieved without introducing new and disruptive methods. A more recent study by Apa et al [1] presented TD perception and management from the perspectives of startups' practitioners in Uruguay. The authors found that TD prevention is one of the most frequent activities in software startups.…”

Section: Technical Debtmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5.2. Previous studies have focused on covering and addressing several startup lifecycle phases by unfolding the TD challenges and benefits [1,4]. We focus more on investigating how TD perception evolves when startups transition from early to growth phases.…”

Section: Early Versus Growth Phase Startup Technical Debt Perceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Facing Technical Debt 1 (TD) is becoming even more of an urgent need for many software startups [4,10,28]. Empirical evidence on how TD is perceived from software startups when transitioning from early to growth phases is still meager [1,4,18,19,26]. There is a need for empirical evidence [29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Startups Transitioning from Early to Growth Phase - A Pilot Study of Technical Debt Perception

Cico

Souza

Jaccheri

et al. 2021

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

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Context: Software startups are software-intensive early phase companies with high growth rates. Previous researchers regarded startups' time to market as short and decisive in establishing the product/service success. This led to shortcuts in software engineering decisions. Researchers in previous investigations documented a high accumulation of technical debt (TD) in early startup phases. However, we found little evidence in the literature concerning TD when startups transition to the growth phase. Aim: Our goal was to evaluate how the transition from early to growth phases affects TD perception in software startups. Methodology: We conducted a pilot study guided by semi-structured interviews from multiple software startup cases. Results: We identified the four following dimensions: (1) managing, (2) accepting, (3) avoiding, and (4) ignoring TD. Contribution: Our study will allow practitioners to address TD in growth-phase software startups. Future researchers can benefit from our findings by conducting exploratory studies and providing educated recommendations.

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Section: Technical Debtmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Early Versus Growth Phase Startup Technical Debt Perceptionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Startups Transitioning from Early to Growth Phase - A Pilot Study of Technical Debt Perception

Cico

Souza

Jaccheri

et al. 2021

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

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“…Thirty-three participants (13%) informed to work in startups. An in-depth analysis of this survey results, considering only the startup context is available in [1].…”

Section: Participants' Characterizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, the IS.uy program 1 was created in 2019 to collaborate with the Uruguayan software industry through evidence-based software engineering research. The IS.uy program aims to promote collaborative and applied software engineering research among industry, government, and academia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Taste of the Software Industry Perception of Technical Debt and its Management in Uruguay

Apa

Solari

Vallespir

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 14th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)

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Background: Technical debt (TD) has been an important focus of attention in recent years by the scientific community and the software industry. TD is a concept for expressing the lack of internal software quality that directly affects its capacity to evolve. Some studies have focused on the TD industry perspective. Aims: To characterize how the software industry professionals in Uruguay understand, perceive, and adopt technical debt management (TDM) activities. Method: To replicate a Brazilian survey with the Uruguayan software industry and compare their findings. Results: From 259 respondents, many indicated any awareness of the TD concept due to the faced difficult to realize how to associate such a concept with actual software issues. Therefore, it is possible to observe a considerable variability in the importance of TDM among the respondents. However, a small part of the respondents declares to carry out TDM activities in their organizations. A list of software technologies declared as used by practitioners was produced and can be useful to support TDM activities. Conclusions: The TD concept and its management are not common yet in Uruguay. There are indications of TD unawareness and difficulties in the conduction of some TDM activities considered as very important by the practitioners. There is a need for more effort aiming to disseminate the TD knowledge and to provide software technologies to support the adoption of TDM in Uruguay. It is likely other software engineering communities face similar issues. Therefore, further investigations in these communities can be of interest. CCS CONCEPTS • General and reference → Surveys and overviews; • Software and its engineering → Software post-development issues.

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