Requirements engineering in software startups: a systematic mapping study

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Authors
Gupta, Varun
Fernandez-Crehuet, Jose Maria
Author (Corporation)
Publication date
03.09.2020
Typ of student thesis
Course of study
Type
01A - Journal article
Editors
Editor (Corporation)
Supervisor
Parent work
Applied Sciences
Special issue
DOI of the original publication
Link
Series
Series number
Volume
10
Issue / Number
17
Pages / Duration
Patent number
Publisher / Publishing institution
MDPI
Place of publication / Event location
Basel
Edition
Version
Programming language
Assignee
Practice partner / Client
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Subject (DDC)
330 - Wirtschaft
Project
Event
Exhibition start date
Exhibition end date
Conference start date
Conference end date
Date of the last check
ISBN
ISSN
2076-3417
Language
English
Created during FHNW affiliation
Yes
Strategic action fields FHNW
Publication status
Published
Review
Peer review of the complete publication
Open access category
Gold
License
'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/'
Citation
GUPTA, Varun, Jose Maria FERNANDEZ-CREHUET, Thomas HANNE und Rainer TELESKO, 2020. Requirements engineering in software startups: a systematic mapping study. Applied Sciences. 3 September 2020. Bd. 10, Nr. 17. DOI 10.3390/app10176125. Verfügbar unter: https://doi.org/10.26041/fhnw-6728