Enablers and Inhibitors of Experimentation in Early-Stage Software Startups

Abstract

Software startups are temporary organizations that develop innovative software-intensive products or services. Despite of numerous successful stories, most startups fail. Several methodologies were proposed both in the scientific and commercial literature to improve their success rate, and a common element among them is the idea of experimentation. This concept was brought to software development as an approach focused on taking critical product assumptions as hypotheses and developing experiments to support or refute them. Although well-known methodologies are based on this idea, the literature shows that software startups still do not follow this approach. The goal of this paper is to identify the enablers and inhibitors of experimentation in early-stage software startups. To achieve the goal, we performed a multiple-case study of four software startups. The results comprise a set of enablers and inhibitors divided into the categories of individual, organizational context, and environment.