The relationship between business model experimentation and technical debt

Abstract

The use of lean software development methodology and business model experimentation has become popular in software companies in recent years. Business model experimentation is used to validate assumptions made on a product from real customers before the actual product is created. A minimum viable product is used to test the business model by gathering and measuring customer feedback. However, in many cases creating a minimum viable product requires the development team to take shortcuts and workarounds in the product. This phenomenon in software development is called ‘technical debt’, where companies trade long-term software quality to short-term gain in time-tomarket. We investigated four software companies and conducted nine interviews to understand the relationship between business model experimentation and technical debt. The goal was to study how business model experimentation is affecting to technical debt. The results showed that business model experimentation has a clear relationship to technical debt.