Fostering product innovations in software startups through freelancer supported requirement engineering
Author (Corporation)
Publication date
2020
Typ of student thesis
Course of study
Collections
Type
01A - Journal article
Editors
Editor (Corporation)
Supervisor
Parent work
Results in Engineering
Special issue
DOI of the original publication
Link
Series
Series number
Volume
8
Issue / Number
Pages / Duration
Patent number
Publisher / Publishing institution
Elsevier
Place of publication / Event location
Edition
Version
Programming language
Assignee
Practice partner / Client
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Software engineering, Freelancer, Open innovation, Co-creation, Value proposition innovation
Subject (DDC)
330 - Wirtschaft
Event
Exhibition start date
Exhibition end date
Conference start date
Conference end date
Date of the last check
ISBN
ISSN
2590-1230
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
Citation
GUPTA, Varun, Jose Maria FERNANDEZ-CREHUET, Thomas HANNE und Rainer TELESKO, 2020. Fostering product innovations in software startups through freelancer supported requirement engineering. Results in Engineering. 2020. Bd. 8. DOI 10.1016/j.rineng.2020.100175. Verfügbar unter: https://doi.org/10.26041/fhnw-6759