The Developers Dilemma: Perfect Product Development or Fast Business Validation?

Are Software Startups Applying Agile Practices? The State of the Practice from a Large Survey

“…Another specific angle investigated in our study is the use of agile practices by software startups that adopted the Lean Startup approach. Some studies have expressed the concerns that startups adopting the Lean Startup approach have to sacrifice certain agile practices or product quality due to limited funding and short runway in order to move fast and test business hypotheses with MVPs [8,10]. However, the findings reported in Sect.…”

“…Especially in terms of test first, frequent release and daily standup meeting, significantly higher portions of lean startups practice them. With these practices that address both needs of quality and speed, lean software startups may be in a good position to manage the "developers dilemma" [10], better at balancing between quality and speed to achieve fast product iteration.…”

“…The priority in this case should be to create an MVP, which may lack in quality but is functional enough to show to investors. Terho et al [10] also argue the need of balancing between quality and speed in creating MVPs, the intensified "developers dilemma" faced by software startups. As a consequence, the agile practices that are focused on quality of software, such as test-driven development and refactoring, may be compromised or even not taken on board.…”

“…The adoption of agile practices can be further complicated when software startups follow the Lean Startup approach to develop their business, which puts even more emphasis on quick prototyping [9], testing prototypes with potential customers, and getting early feedback. The use of Lean Startup approach may intensify the so-called "developers dilemma"-the balancing act between quality and speed to achieve fast product iteration [10], and render the agile practices related to quality even less viable to software startups.…”

The Product Developer in the Centre of Product Development: A Systematic Literature Review on Describing Factors

“…Factors influencing the developer are: social support by executives (Todt et al 2018), conflicts of objectives between developers and management (Terho et al 2016), passing on customer feedback and new product ideas by dealers (Restuccia et al 2016), environmental turbulence (Dayan and Di Benedetto 2011) and the combination of time pressure, management support and high project experience (Zika-Viktorsson and Ingelgård 2006). The factors influenced by the developer include the size of the team, the duration of the team's existence, the strength of the relationships within the team, the degree of clustering within the team (Datta 2018), the team experience combined with intuitive cognitive decision making (Dayan and Di Benedetto 2011), the amount of reflective activities (Zika-Viktorsson and Ingelgård 2006), the personal integrity of the developer (Morton et al 2006) and the team climate in combination with financial resource bottlenecks (Weiss, M. Hoegl, M. and Gibbert 2011).…”