2021, Gupta, Varun, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer, Silhavy, Radek

This exploratory case study was conducted with five IT startups in order to investigate how requirement engineering-related activities are performed and what is the state of maturity with the practices & tools used. Another objective was to study that how the startups managed their practices during Corona Virus (COVID19) pandemic time. The results indicate that flexibility and access to the online tools were the main strengths of the startups to cope up with the pandemic situation while fluctuating market demands affected them marginally. The startups do vary in domain, team size, practices and selection of the tools, with matured startups having more structured (but flexible) processes compared to younger startups. The young startups have the opportunity to learn from the practices of the matured startups, to adopt the learning in their working context. The previous software development experience of the startups and its founders does affect the maturity of the practices and selection of the tools. The flexibility and agility as evident in the working context of the startups helped them to turn pandemic situation into their business opportunities.

2020, Gupta, Varun, Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer

This research paper explores the involvement of freelancers in requirement engineering activities to continuously innovating the value propositions and utilizing their expertise in various requirement engineering tasks. This paper reports the case study conducted with the startups that involve freelancers for the requirement engineering activities. The findings are then compared with the literature to explore the freelancer supported requirement engineering domain. Results indicate that the freelancers could help innovate value proposition by providing different perspectives of the global segments and also expertise in executing requirement engineering activities. The freelancers have varying levels of involvement in requirement engineering activities depending on on startup contexts and is highly challenged by various inhibitors. The inhibitors include difficulty to select freelancers optimally, ensuring their long term association for continuous rework arising because of continuous learnings in the market, building trust, mechanism to integrate their perspective, establishing communication, negotiations and strategic pricings. However, there is a need to optimally establish the freelancer involvement from beginning of the startup life cycle with a promise for long term benefits in exchange for their trustworthy and accurate perspectives, which is harder to get by involving crowds of customers due to resource limitations. Further research is required to investigate how freelancers could represent the samples of globally distributed customer segments as input source of information on one side and on another side become startup team representatives to establish direct interactions with global customer segments.

2020-09-03, Gupta, Varun, Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria, Hanne, Thomas, Telesko, Rainer

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.

2020, Gupta, Varun, Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria, Gupta, Chetna, Hanne, Thomas

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.

2020, Gupta, Varun, Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria, Hanne, Thomas

[Context] The software startups could continuously innovate business model value proposition by involving freelancers as a source of innovative ideas (that enhance customer perceived value) and as experts for implementing the innovative ideas (by undertaking software engineering tasks). Startups employ one of three strategies for associating with freelancers i.e., task based (association ends with completion of the outsourced task), panel based (outsourcing task to a panel of freelancers associated with startup), or hybrid. Uncertainties, terminology issues, high technical debt, lack of documentation, lack of systematic decision making processes, lack of resources, lack of brand values, need for the continuous involvement of the freelancer to incorporate continuous validated learnings, merging freelancer perspectives, and deciding the level of their involvement in individual requirement engineering (or value proposition innovation) activities, are the main inhibitors for associations with freelancers. The availability of good freelancers and their long term and continuous commitments are necessary requirements for value proposition innovation. The theory about freelancer association with the software startups is extended by studying the real practices of startups, which successfully involved freelancers for value proposition innovation by capturing innovative ideas and acquiring the freelancer’s skills to implement those ideas. [Objectives] The objective of this paper is to explain the strategies adopted by the software startups to foster value proposition innovation by continuously involving the freelancers and the way they overcome the challenges arising because of the associations. The findings are driven by the study of real practices of startups that proved to be successful in the market by involving freelancers and continuous innovations leading to increased market shares. [Method] This paper performs empirical studies through case studies of three software startups located in Italy, France, and India, which are at the verge of being transforming into big companies, with large market share. The current practices highlighting the successful way of executing freelancing association strategies for value proposition innovation and the way to overcome the arising challenges are reported. The findings are also compared with those of two young startups based in Switzerland and India, to bring useful lessons for the young startups. The case study results are validated by employees from the studied startups (both those who participated in data collection and those who did not). [Results] The results indicate that freelancer involvement during value proposition activities, which is the core business operation, is beneficial to the both freelancers and the startups. Startup teams could reduce the development costs, shorten time to market, and increase customer satisfaction (by providing features addressing real market needs) by correctly involving the freelancers uniformly across value proposition activities. The startups could manage innovation with small teams (compared to human resources in companies) if done jointly with the freelancers, that helps the team members to learn new skills, upgrade their skills, and learn new perspectives about their markets. Business impacts due to freelancer involvement are stronger if the level of freelancer involvement across various value proposition activities is higher compared to their involvement across few activities only. The studied startups are not completely dependent on the freelancers but the freelancer’s perspectives and skills are valued as a rich source of market success. Freelancer involvement is taken as an opportunity to gain access to global market perspectives, which otherwise would be effortful for in-house teams to collect. In addition, they resolve technical debt, are a source of upgrading skills for undertaking future innovation, and help reaching customers for marketing (promoting product and gaining access to the feedbacks). Overall, the value proposition innovation in the studied startups have different levels of involvement of the freelancers but these startups have reported positive impacts on the business in terms of development cost reductions, shorten time to market, and high customer satisfaction (measured on early attainment of product/market fit and fast growth thereafter). The case study results are validated by the startup employees (member checking). The responses collected are analysed using box plots, which shows a higher level of result agreements among the employees.

2015, Dornberger, Rolf, Hanne, Thomas, Gupta, Varun, Gupta, Chetna, Srivastav, Maneesha