What do we know about Testing practices in Software Startups?

Sammanfattning: Context. With the rapid development of the software industry, innovative software products become the mainstream of the software market. Because software startups can use a few resources to quickly produce and publish innovative software products, more and more software startups are launched. Software testing is important to ensure the quality of product in software companies. Software testing is costly in software development, but if software testing is avoided, it could be costlier. Many different regular software companies spend up to 40-50% of development efforts on software testing [1] [2]. Compared with other regular software companies, time and money are finite and need to be allocated reasonably in software startups. Unreasonable allocation of time and money could lead to the failure of software startups. We don’t know how much software startups spend for testing, and few research studies have investigated the testing practices in software startups. Therefore, we decided to conduct an exploratory study to know about the testing practices in software startups. Objectives. The aim of the research is to investigate testing practices in software startups. In this study, we investigate software startups’ structure and how to manage their test team. The test processes and test techniques used in software startups have been researched. And the main testing challenges in software startups have been investigated as well. Methods. We mainly conducted a qualitative research for the study. We selected literature review and survey as the research method. The literature review method is used to get in-depth understanding of software testing practices in software companies. Survey is used to answer our research questions. We used interview as our data collection method. And in order to analyze data from interviews, we selected descriptive statistics method. Results. A total of 13 responses were obtained through interviews from 9 software startups. We got results from 9 investigated software startups to structure and manage their test teams. We analyzed the common steps of test processes and classified the techniques they used in the 9 software startups. At last, we analyzed and listed the main testing challenges that are occurred in the 9 software startups. Conclusions. The research objectives are fulfilled. The research questions have been answered. We got the conclusion based on 9 software startups. The 9 companies cannot represent all software startups, but we can know about test practices in software startups initially through the 13 interviews. We also found some differences about testing practice between 9 software startups and regular software companies. Our study is a primary research to explore testing practices in 9 software startups, we provided some data and analysis results of the 9 companies to the researchers who want to research some related area. In addition, our research could help someone who plans to set up a software company. They can use the data we collected to think about the testing practice in their own company. Then find out the best way to prevent and resolve the problem in testing.