Exploration of technical debt in start-ups

Klotins, Eriks; Unterkalmsteiner, Michael; Chatzipetrou, Panagiota; Gorschek, Tony; Prikladnicki, Rafael; Tripathi, Nirnaya; Pompermaier, Leandro Bento (2018-05-27)
 
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3183519.3183539

Klotins, Eriks
Unterkalmsteiner, Michael
Chatzipetrou, Panagiota
Gorschek, Tony
Prikladnicki, Rafael
Tripathi, Nirnaya
Pompermaier, Leandro Bento
Association for Computing Machinery
27.05.2018

Eriks Klotins, Michael Unterkalmsteiner, Panagiota Chatzipetrou, Tony Gorschek, Rafael Prikladnicki, Nirnaya Tripathi, and Leandro Bento Pompermaier. 2018. Exploration of technical debt in start-ups. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 75-84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3183519.3183539

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© ACM 2018. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP '18), http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3183519.3183539
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doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/3183519.3183539
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https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe201901142111
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Abstract

Context: Software start-ups are young companies aiming to build and market software-intensive products fast with little resources. Aiming to accelerate time-to-market, start-ups often opt for ad-hoc engineering practices, make shortcuts in product engineering, and accumulate technical debt.

Objective: In this paper we explore to what extent precedents, dimensions and outcomes associated with technical debt are prevalent in start-ups.

Method: We apply a case survey method to identify aspects of technical debt and contextual information characterizing the engineering context in start-ups.

Results: By analyzing responses from 86 start-up cases we found that start-ups accumulate most technical debt in the testing dimension, despite attempts to automate testing. Furthermore, we found that start-up team size and experience is a leading precedent for accumulating technical debt: larger teams face more challenges in keeping the debt under control.

Conclusions: This study highlights the necessity to monitor levels of technical debt and to preemptively introduce practices to keep the debt under control. Adding more people to an already difficult to maintain product could amplify other precedents, such as resource shortages, communication issues and negatively affect decisions pertaining to the use of good engineering practices.

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