Lean Software Startup Practices and Software Engineering Education

Abstract

In the modern economy, software drives innovation and economic growth. Studies show how software increasingly influences all industry sectors. Over the past 5 decades, software engineering has also changed significantly to advance the development of various types and scales of software products. Software engineering education plays an essential role in apprising students of software technologies, processes, and practices popular in industries. Furthermore, approaches to teaching software engineering are becoming more interdisciplinary and team-centered, comparable to startup contexts. In this PhD work, I want to answer the following research questions: (1) To what extent are software engineering trends present in software engineering education research? (2) What set of common software engineering practices employed in lean software startups is transferable to the software engineering education context? (3) What is the impact of lean startup practices on software engineering students and curricula? I utilize (1) a literature review, (2) mixed-methods approaches in gathering empirical evidence, and (3) design-based research. In the first phase of the research, I pinpoint the relevance of the lean startup in software engineering education through an extensive literature review. I gather empirical evidence on lean startup practices and assess their potential transferability to software engineering education during the second research phase. I demonstrate that the lean startup is an emerging trend in software engineering education research. I demonstrate that students can acquire soft, hard, and project management skills in a more realistic context in the introduction of the growth phase of lean startup practices throughout external course activities. I expect software engineering curricula to benefit from the model and framework that I propose and validate, thus facilitating lean startup practice transfer to software engineering curricula.