Preface of the Workshop Organizers

The First International Workshop on Requirement Engineering for Software startups and Emerging Technologies (RESET) is a part of IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference 2021, held on 20th September, 2021. The workshop brought together requirements engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the need for adapting conventional requirement engineering artifacts (i.e. requirement definition, metrics), processes and practices to software projects in startup context and/or dealing with emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain etc. Further, the workshop also presents research findings about designing AI powered software systems ethically. The work…

Business Model Canvas Should Pay More Attention to the Software Startup Team

Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a tool widely used to describe startup business models. Despite the various business aspects described, BMC pays a little emphasis on team- related factors. The importance of team-related factors in software development has been acknowledged widely in literature. While not as extensively studied, the importance of teams in software startups is also known in both literature and among practitioners. In this paper, we propose potential changes to BMC to have the tool better reflect the importance of the team, especially in a software startup environment. Based on a literature review, we identify various components related to the team, which we then further suppor…

Internal Software Startups - A Multiple Case Study on Practices, Methods, and Success Factors

Startups are often seen as drivers of innovation. In an attempt to leverage this potential, larger business organizations have founded internal startups as a subset of internal corporate ventures (ICV). These smaller organizations are intended to be more agile than the parent organization, in order to produce new service and product innovations using their own methods and practices independently of the organizational culture and methods of the parent organization. However, our understanding of ICVs is still lacking in terms of processes and success factors, and especially the more recent internal startups have scarcely been studied thus far. To approach this novel area of research, we take …

StartCards — A method for early-stage software startups

Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s) Context: Software startups are important drivers of economy on a global scale, and have become associated with innovation and high growth. However, the overwhelming majority of startups ends in failure. Many of these startup failures ultimately stem from software engineering issues, and requirements engineering (RE) ones in particular. Despite the emphasis placed on the importance of RE activities in the startup context, many startups continue to develop software without a clear market or customer, having never had meaningful contact with their would-be customer. Objective: We develop a method aimed at early-stage startups that is intended to help s…

Software Startup ESSENCE : How Should Software Startups Work?

Software startups need to work in a systematic fashion just like mature organizations. However, existing software engineering methods and practices are not aimed at software startups. They do not account for the business aspect of startups and may not be well suited for software startups in general. The Lean Startup Methodology on the other hand contains some useful practices for software startups but is nonetheless impractical, offering little in the way of telling you what to do. Software startups are thus required to tailor their own method. Currently, many software startups simply work ad hoc or use various Agile methods and practices. In terms of Agile methods and practices, little con…

Key Influencing Factors in Early-Stage Hardware Startups: A Trilateral Model of Speed, Resource, and Quality

Hardware startups, i.e., wearable devices, robotics, and Internet of Things, are a significant sector of technology startups, in which software development is relevant and needed. Compared to pure software startups, hardware development in startup contexts lacks a systematic approach and guidelines. This chapter describes an empirical model that captures common elements in product development approaches among many hardware startups. Grounded from insights of 18 active hardware startups, we constructed a trilateral model of resource, speed, and quality in early-stage product development. For startups with relevant contexts, the work suggests the preparation of internal, external resources, a…

A Tool-Based Approach for Essentializing Software Engineering Practices

Software Engineers work using highly diverse methods and practices, and general theories in software engineering are lacking. A recent attempt at creating a common ground in the area of software engineering methodologies has been the Essence Theory of Software Engineering. Essence is a method-agnostic progress management framework and a meta-method for Software Engineering (SE). However, tooling for Essence is still lacking. Without dedicated tools and other instruments, a meta-method such as Essence is cumbersome to utilize by practitioners and students. Indeed, Essence currently suffers from a lack of widespread practitioner adoption. In this paper, we thus present an Open Source tool for…

An Empirical Study on Female Participation in Software Project Courses

Gender issues in software engineering education are gaining research attention due to the desire to promote female participation in the field. The objective of this work is to enhance the understanding of female students' participation in software engineering projects to support gender-aware course optimization. Since 2015, we have investigated the participation of female students in terms of software engineering activities and team dynamics in a software project course that involves a real customer. We found that female students are more active with project management and requirement engineering, while they remain under-represented in highly complex or specific tasks, i.e. architecture wor…

Startup Metrics That Tech Entrepreneurs Need to Know

Metrics can be used by firms to make more objective decisions based on data. Software startups in particular are characterized by the uncertain or even chaotic nature of the contexts in which they operate. Using data in the form of metrics can help software startups to make the right decisions amid uncertainty and limited resources. However, whereas conventional business metrics and software metrics have been studied in the past, metrics in the specific context of software startups have not been studied. In this chapter, we present the results of a multivocal literature review to offer you 118 metrics practitioner experts think software startups should measure. These metrics can give you id…

Female Leadership in Software Projects—A Preliminary Result on Leadership Style and Project Context Factors

Women have been shown to be effective leaders in many team-based situations. However, it is also well-recognized that women are underrepresented in engineering and technology areas, which leads to wasted efforts and a lack of diversity in professional organizations. Although studies about gender and leadership are rich, research focusing on engineering-specific activities, are scarce. To react on this gap, we explored the experience of female leaders of software development projects and possible context factors that influence leadership effectiveness. The study was conducted as a longitudinal multiple case study. Data was collected from survey, interviews, observation and project reports. I…

Female Leadership in Software Projects : A Preliminary Result on Leadership Style and Project Context Factors

Do Software Firms Collaborate or Compete? A Model of Coopetition in Community-initiated OSS Projects

[Background] An increasing number of commercial firms are participating in Open Source Software (OSS) projects to reduce their development cost and increase technical innovativeness. When collaborating with other firms whose sought values are conflicts of interests, firms may behave uncooperatively leading to harmful impacts on the common goal. [Aim] This study explores how software firms both collaborate and compete in OSS projects. [Method] We adopted a mixed research method on three OSS projects. [Result] We found that commercial firms participating in community-initiated OSS projects collaborate in various ways across the organizational boundaries. While most of firms contribute little,…

A Multiple Case Study of Artificial Intelligent System Development in Industry

There is a rapidly increasing amount of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems developed in recent years, with much expectation on its capacity of innovation and business value generation. However, the promised value of AI systems in specific business contexts might not be understood, and further integrated into the development processes. We wanted to understand how software engineering processes and practices can be applied to develop AI systems in a fast-faced, business-driven manner. As the first step, we explored contextual factors of AI development and the connections between AI developments to business opportunities. We conducted 12 semi-structured interviews in seven companies in Brazi…

Continuous experimentation on artificial intelligence software : a research agenda

Moving from experiments to industrial level AI software development requires a shift from understanding AI/ ML model attributes as a standalone experiment to know-how integrating and operating AI models in a large-scale software system. It is a growing demand for adopting state-of-the-art software engineering paradigms into AI development, so that the development efforts can be aligned with business strategies in a lean and fast-paced manner. We describe AI development as an “unknown unknown” problem where both business needs and AI models evolve over time. We describe a holistic view of an iterative, continuous approach to develop industrial AI software basing on business goals, requiremen…

Gamifying the Escape from the Engineering Method Prison

Software Engineering is an engineering discipline but lacks a solid theoretical foundation. One effort in remedying this situation has been the SEMAT Essence specification. Essence consists of a language for modeling Software Engineering (SE) practices and methods and a kernel containing what its authors describe as being elements that are present in every software development project. In practice, it is a method agnostic project management tool for SE Projects. Using the language of the specification, Essence can be used to model any software development method or practice. Thus, the specification can potentially be applied to any software development context, making it a powerful tool. Ho…

The Essence Theory of Software Engineering – Large-Scale Classroom Experiences from 450+ Software Engineering BSc Students

Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practical project work. In this paper, we study Essence in an educational setting to evaluate its usefuln…

A preliminary study of agility in business and production - Cases of early-stage hardware startups

[Context] Advancement in technologies, popularity of small-batch manufacturing and the recent trend of investing in hardware startups are among the factors leading to the rise of hardware startups nowadays. It is essential for hardware startups, companies that involve both software and hardware development, to be not only agile to develop their business but also efficient to develop the right products. [Objective] We investigate how hardware startups achieve agility when developing their products in early stages. [Methods] A qualitative research is conducted with data from 20 hardware startups. [Result] Preliminary results show that agile development is known to hardware entrepreneurs, howe…

Software Startup Practices -- Software Development in Startups through the Lens of the Essence Theory of Software Engineering

Software startups continue to be important drivers of economy globally. As the initial investment required to found a new software company becomes smaller and smaller resulting from technological advances such as cloud technology, increasing numbers of new software startups are born. Typically, the main argument for studying software startups is that they differ from mature software organizations in various ways, thus making the findings of many existing studies not directly applicable to them. How, exactly, software startups really differ from other types of software organizations as an on-going debate. In this paper, we seek to better understand how software startups differ from mature so…

Startup Metrics That Tech Entrepreneurs Need to Know

Metrics can be used by firms to make more objective decisions based on data. Software startups in particular are characterized by the uncertain or even chaotic nature of the contexts in which they operate. Using data in the form of metrics can help software startups to make the right decisions amid uncertainty and limited resources. However, whereas conventional business metrics and software metrics have been studied in the past, metrics in the specific context of software startups have not been studied. In this chapter, we present the results of a multivocal literature review to offer you 118 metrics practitioner experts think software startups should measure. These metrics can give you id…

The entrepreneurial logic of startup software development : A study of 40 software startups

Context: Software startups are an essential source of innovation and software-intensive products. The need to understand product development in startups and to provide relevant support are highlighted in software research. While state-of-the-art literature reveals how startups develop their software, the reasons why they adopt these activities are underexplored. Objective: This study investigates the tactics behind software engineering (SE) activities by analyzing key engineering events during startup journeys. We explore how entrepreneurial mindsets may be associated with SE knowledge areas and with each startup case. Method: Our theoretical foundation is based on causation and effectuatio…