Open Access

Jil Klünder, Florian Heintz, Jakob Droste, Marion Wiese, Marco KuhrmannORCiD

• Several software startups fail due to the competitive environment, time constraints, limited financial ressources, and other aspects. To overcome some of these issues, in particular regarding time and finance, startups try to release their software product as quickly as possible. For this, they often cut corners on different aspects of the product, unconsciously accepting technical debt. We argue that startups are often not aware of long-term effects of technical debt and, hence, unconciously accept software- and process-related shortcomings when developing the product. In order to raise the awareness for technical debt and to help startups avoid it, we extend the Entrepreneurial Software Engineering Model grounded in insights from literature. For each software development phase in startups, our extension puts special emphasis on technical debt, e.g., by integrating aspects such as architecture testing and specific quality gates that are often not part of software processes in early stage startups.