Value-based technical debt management: an exploratory case study in start-ups and scale-ups

Software start-ups face fierce competition in the market forcing them to release their products quickly and often under tough time constraints. To meet their deadlines, start-ups take shortcuts in software development leading to the accumulation of technical debt. They are able to put their product in users hands faster, get feedback, and improve at the expense of quality issues in the long run. As a start-up evolves through inception, stabilization and growth this debt will have to be managed. Technical debt management and software product line engineering techniques have some similar benefits of increased productivity and reduced time-to-market. Our aim is to check whether software product line engineering can be a candidate technique for start-ups to employ in managing technical debt as a response to their life-cycle phase goals and challenges. We conducted expert interviews with nine start-up professionals to identify the strategies applied in relation to technical debt management and software product lines engineering and other software engineering practices in start-ups. By analyzing the responses from the interviews we found that depending on the life-cycle phase of the start-up software product line engineering proved effective in managing technical debt and helped the start-ups to advance through the life-cycle phases.