Fostering product innovations in software startups through freelancer supported requirement engineering

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.