Software Engineering in Small Software Companies: Consolidating and Integrating Empirical Literature into a Process Tool Adoption Framework

Abstract

Small software companies face numerous challenges of complexity, unstructured software development processes and scarce resources. This notwithstanding, the companies have dominated the software market by 80 percent. The practice and products of these companies are still persistently marred by quality issues arising from the processes, with evidence indicating that process tools do not fit the unique contexts in which they operate. Significant strides have been made to transform software development practice; however, the challenges are still apparent. Hence the need to establish how knowledge areas are applied in process practice, understand the context of software development and its implication in practice, how process tools are utilised in practice and evaluate the quality of research in software literature. The researchers undertook a systematic mapping study to determine the state of practice in the empirical literature on software engineering of SSCs by examining and classifying 1096 publications. Other than the finding that research quality was low and affecting generalisation and transferability, the results also revealed exciting findings, which we finally consolidated and integrated to develop two contributions (i) a software development process adoption theoretical framework that provides essential insights into understanding software development and (ii) a 3-point guideline for research quality. By solving the adoption of process tools in software development, this paper presents one of the most significant contributions to transforming practice in software development and research in small software companies.