Agile Development Practices Applied to Software Startups : A Systematic Mapping Review

Context: Previous studies considered software startups are not applying agile development practices, especially those related to quality. This leads to the accumulation of technical debt. Objective: This study aims at identifying primary studies that describe how startups are applying agile development practices and how they could benefit from these practices, thereby contributing to product quality improvement and better resource allocation. Method: A Systematic Mapping Study was conducted which applied automatic searches so as to identify relevant primary studies. Results: 60 primary studies were identified that present information regarding practices, challenges, and limitations of adopting agile development practices in startups and also the benefits, tools, and ways of simplifying their adoption. Conclusions: 55 agile development practices used by startups were found, the most cited ones being associated with DevOps, Test Automation, and Scrum. The main challenges and limitations are related to the difficulty of adapting legacy systems architecture to support DevOps practices, to market volatility, to the need for quick product release, and to resources, including financial resources, being limited. Benefits related to having improved internal processes were the most cited and 128 tools were classified. Few studies have offered answers on how to simplify adopting agile development practices, although all of them led to tools for automating processes being used.