Embracing Technical Debt, from a Startup Company Perspective

Software\ua0 startups\ua0 are\ua0 typically\ua0 under\ua0 extreme pressure to get to market quickly with limited resources and high uncertainty.\ua0 This\ua0 pressure\ua0 and\ua0 uncertainty\ua0 is\ua0 likely\ua0 to\ua0 cause startups to accumulate technical debt as they make decisions that are more focused on the short-term than the long-term health of the codebase. However, most research on technical debt has been focused\ua0 on\ua0 more\ua0 mature\ua0 software\ua0 teams,\ua0 who\ua0 may\ua0 have\ua0 less pressure\ua0 and,\ua0 therefore,\ua0 reason\ua0 about\ua0 technical\ua0 debt\ua0 very differently\ua0 than\ua0 software\ua0 startups.\ua0 In\ua0 this\ua0 study,\ua0 we\ua0 seek\ua0 to understand\ua0 the\ua0 organizational\ua0 factors\ua0 that\ua0 lead\ua0 to\ua0 and\ua0 the benefits\ua0 and\ua0 challenges\ua0 associated\ua0 with\ua0 the\ua0 intentional accumulation\ua0 of\ua0 technical\ua0 debt\ua0 in\ua0 software\ua0 startups.\ua0 We interviewed 16 professionals involved in seven different software startups.\ua0 We\ua0 find\ua0 that\ua0 the\ua0 startup\ua0 phase,\ua0 the\ua0 experience\ua0 of\ua0 the developers,\ua0 software\ua0 knowledge\ua0 of\ua0 the\ua0 founders,\ua0 and\ua0 level\ua0 of employee\ua0 growth\ua0 are\ua0 some\ua0 of\ua0 the\ua0 organizational\ua0 factors\ua0 that influence\ua0 the\ua0 intentional\ua0 accumulation\ua0 of\ua0 technical\ua0 debt.\ua0 In addition,\ua0 we\ua0 find\ua0 the\ua0 software\ua0 startups\ua0 are\ua0 typically\ua0 driven\ua0 to achieve\ua0 a\ua0 “good\ua0 enough\ua0 level,”\ua0 and\ua0 this\ua0 guides\ua0 the\ua0 amount\ua0 of technical debt that they intentionally accumulate to balance the benefits\ua0 of\ua0 speed\ua0 to\ua0 market\ua0 and\ua0 reduced\ua0 resources\ua0 with\ua0 the challenges of later addressing technical debt

The Changing World of Work: What Should We Ask of Higher Education?

There is a pervasive anxiety in America about the future of higher education. Spiraling costs combined with seismic changes in the American workplace raise questions about whether a bachelor's degree is still worth the cost. In a recent cover story, Newsweek magazine asked: "Is College a Lousy Investment?" For a growing number of Americans, the answer appears to be yes.Today's students accumulate an average of almost $30,000 in debt by the time they graduate. They will go into a job market that looks especially bleak for young people. Many college graduates are unemployed or working minimum-wage jobs. Still more are working in jobs that don't require a college credential.Some of the troubles facing new graduates can be attributed to the post-recession economy. But there are larger forces at work that are transforming the nature of employment in America -- forces that colleges and universities have been slow to recognize, much less respond to

Securitize Me: Stimulating Renewable Energy Financing by Embracing the Capital Markets

The current system of financing renewable energy projects is broken and inadequate, especially when compared to the framework for participating in oil and gas ventures. The solution lies in borrowing accepted energy business practices and adapting them to solar and wind energy projects. This Article focuses on the current issues facing renewable energy project financing in the United States, analyzes failed attempts to stimulate growth, and presents the securitization of renewable energy assets as a solution. Drawing on current legal structure and debates from the corporate sphere, this Article also discusses specific securitization techniques that can help to democratize and grow investment in renewable energy projects

Technical Debt: An empirical investigation of its harmfulness and on management strategies in industry

Background: In order to survive in today\u27s fast-growing and ever fast-changing business environment, software companies need to continuously deliver customer value, both from a short- and long-term perspective. However, the consequences of potential long-term and far-reaching negative effects of shortcuts and quick fixes made during the software development lifecycle, described as Technical Debt (TD), can impede the software development process.Objective: The overarching goal of this Ph.D. thesis is twofold. The first goal is to empirically study and understand in what way and to what extent, TD influences today’s software development work, specifically with the intention to provide more quantitative insight into the field. Second, to understand which different initiatives can reduce the negative effects of TD and also which factors are important to consider when implementing such initiatives.Method: To achieve the objectives, a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies are used, including interviews, surveys, a systematic literature review, a longitudinal study, analysis of documents, correlation analysis, and statistical tests. In seven of the eleven studies included in this Ph.D. thesis, a combination of multiple research methods are used to achieve high validity.Results: We present results showing that software suffering from TD will cause various negative effects on both the software and the developing process. These negative effects are illustrated from a technical, financial, and a developer’s working situational perspective. These studies also identify several initiatives that can be undertaken in order to reduce the negative effects of TD.Conclusion: The results show that software developers report that they waste 23% of their working time due to experiencing TD and that TD required them to perform additional time-consuming work activities. This study also shows that, compared to all types of TD, architectural TD has the greatest negative impact on daily software development work and that TD has negative effects on several different software quality attributes. Further, the results show that TD reduces developer morale. Moreover, the findings show that intentionally introducing TD in startup companies can allow the startups to cut development time, enabling faster feedback and increased revenue, preserve resources, and decrease risk and thereby contribute to beneficial\ua0effects. This study also identifies several initiatives that can be undertaken in order to reduce the negative effects of TD, such as the introduction of a tracking process where the TD items are introduced in an official backlog. The finding also indicates that there is an unfulfilled potential regarding how managers can influence the manner in which software practitioners address TD

ORCHESTRATING INTERCULTURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION PROGRAMMES: A MEDITERRANEAN DIALOGUE ATTEMPT

Although intercultural diversity is an important regulator of entrepreneurship, there is a dearth of studies that explore its influence on the interaction between entrepreneurship education programmes design and startup creation process’s actors. Previous studies mainly devoted attention to examine intercultural diversity’s effects on teams’ dynamics spotlighting its relationship with leadership, virtual working and organizations’ performance. In this vein and drawing on national cultural and organizational change, this study aims at investigating the intercultural diversity’s role in influencing the entrepreneurship education programmes design configurations and networks. Drawing on a single case study, we conduct semi-structured interviews gathered from 42 multicultural and heterogeneous teams, advisors and organizers of BESTMEDGRAPE, an entrepreneurship education programme involving five Mediterranean countries (France, Jordon, Italy, Lebanon and Tunisia) which followed nascent entrepreneurs all along the startup creation process. The contribution of this study is to conceptualize the interplay between intercultural diversity, entrepreneurship education programme and startup dynamics by generating new dimensions that crystallize the relationship between entrepre-neurship education literature and organizational ecosystems

Technical Debt Management in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

The need to release our products under tough time constraints has required us to take shortcuts during the implementation of our products and to postpone the correct implementation, thereby accumulating Technical Debt. In this work, we report the experience of a Finnish SME (Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) in managing Technical Debt (TD), investigating the most common types of TD they faced in the past, their causes, and their effects. The case company is a spin-off which sells one product. Its development was outsourced in the beginning and later continued with external developers. We set up a focus group in the case-company, involving different roles. The results showed that the most significant TD in the company stems from disagreements with the supplier and lack of test automation. Specification and test TD are the most significant types of TD. Budget and time constraints were identified as the most potential root causes of TD. TD occurs when time or budget is limited or the amount and content of work are not understood properly. However, not all postponed activities generated ”debt”. Sometimes the accumulation of TD helped meet deadlines without a major impact, while in other cases the cost for repaying the TD was much higher than the benefits. From this study, we found out that learning from customers, careful estimations and continuous improvement could be potential strategies to mitigate TD. These strategies include iterative validation with customers, efficient communication with stakeholders, improvement of meta-cognition in estimations, and value orientation in budgeting and scheduling

Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations

Ohjelmistoprojektin riskien ja prosessien hallinta startup-yrityksessä: Tapaustutkimus

Software projects are notorious for their failure rates and software maintenance is a complex task that often becomes more time-consuming as the software ages. In modern software development, maintenance is often done in an iterative fashion with the help of continuous integration and deployment tools to help with quality assurance. This thesis is a postmortem case study of the design and development involved in a user interface rewrite project conducted for a healthtech SaaS-product. The focus of the study is on investigating how efficient the methods of working were, what pain points were identified and how well the risks were managed for the project. It aims to provide insight on how early-stage companies with limited resources can see through a sizable effort such as this efficiently. Focus is also given to whether a transition towards a microservice-architecture is a viable choice within this context. The key findings from the conducted case study are that even when following agile practices, a systematic approach to software engineering is essential for success. Projects should have a clear scope and clear responsibilities in order for their success to be measurable. Team composition and individual skills are the crucial elements in a development team, and tools and practices only strengthen the results of individuals. However, open communication, motivated individuals and visibility into progress are also essential.Ohjelmistoprojektien epäonnistuminen on tutkitusti yleistä ja ohjelmistojen ylläpito on kompleksinen tehtävä, jonka vaatimat resurssit usein kasvavat ohjelmiston vanhetessa. Modernissa ohjelmistokehityksessä ylläpito usein tehdään iteratiivisesti, hyödyntäen jatkuvaa integraatiota laadunvarmistuksen apuna. Tämä diplomityö on tapaustutkimus terveysteknologiaan keskittyneen SaaS-sovelluksen uudistukseen liittyneestä kehitys- ja suunnittelutyöstä. Tutkielma keskittyy tutkimaan projektin riskinhallintaa, kehitysmetodien ja -prosessien tehokkuutta sekä löytämään näistä kipupisteitä. Työn tavoitteena on löytää resursseiltaan rajallisille alkuvaiheen ohjelmistoyrityksille soveltuvia työtapoja sekä selvittää, kuinka tämänkaltainen laaja kehitystyö voidaan suorittaa onnistuneesti. Tutkimus myös pyrkii selvittämään onko mikropalveluarkkitehtuuriin siirtyminen kannattavaa tässä kontekstissa. Työn tuloksena havaittiin, että systemaattinen lähestyminen ohjelmistokehitykseen on olennaista onnistumisen kannalta myös ketteriä menetelmiä hyödynnettäessä. Projekteilla tulisi olla selkeä laajuus ja selkeät tavoitteet, jotta projektin onnistumista voidaan mitata objektiivisesti. Kehitystiimin dynamiikka ja yksilöiden taidot ovat tärkein osa kehitystiimiä, ja työkaluilla ja menetelmillä on vain toissijainen vaikutus yksilöiden suorituskykyyn. Toisaalta myös avoin kommunikaatio, motivoituneet yksilöt ja kehityksen läpinäkyvyys ovat olennaisessa asemassa

DevOps for Digital Leaders

DevOps; continuous delivery; software lifecycle; concurrent parallel testing; service management; ITIL; GRC; PaaS; containerization; API management; lean principles; technical debt; end-to-end automation; automatio