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Enablers and Inhibitors of Experimentation in Early-Stage Software Startups

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11915))

Abstract

Software startups are temporary organizations that develop innovative software-intensive products or services. Despite of numerous successful stories, most startups fail. Several methodologies were proposed both in the scientific and commercial literature to improve their success rate, and a common element among them is the idea of experimentation. This concept was brought to software development as an approach focused on taking critical product assumptions as hypotheses and developing experiments to support or refute them. Although well-known methodologies are based on this idea, the literature shows that software startups still do not follow this approach. The goal of this paper is to identify the enablers and inhibitors of experimentation in early-stage software startups. To achieve the goal, we performed a multiple-case study of four software startups. The results comprise a set of enablers and inhibitors divided into the categories of individual, organizational context, and environment.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially funded by FAPERGS (17/2551-0001/205-4).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Jorge Melegati & Xiaofeng Wang

  2. School of Technology, PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Rafael Chanin, Afonso Sales & Rafael Prikladnicki

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  1. Jorge Melegati
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  2. Rafael Chanin
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  3. Xiaofeng Wang
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  4. Afonso Sales
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  5. Rafael Prikladnicki
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Correspondence to Jorge Melegati .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Xavier Franch

  2. University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Tomi Männistö

  3. Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Silverio Martínez-Fernández

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Melegati, J., Chanin, R., Wang, X., Sales, A., Prikladnicki, R. (2019). Enablers and Inhibitors of Experimentation in Early-Stage Software Startups. In: Franch, X., Männistö, T., Martínez-Fernández, S. (eds) Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11915. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_39

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