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Towards Effective Technical Debt Decision Making in Software Startups

Context: Technical Debt (TD) is a metaphor used to describe outstanding software maintenance tasks or shortcuts made in the software development to achieve short-term benefits (i.e. time to market), but negatively impact the software quality in the long term. TD is quite common in a software startup, which is characterized as a young company with low resources and a small client base, aiming to accelerate time to market. Decisions related to TD can be critical for startup success. Objective: I aim to understand the relationship between TD decisions and the success or failure of software startups, and explore the best practices related to TD decisions that would better contribute to the startup success. Method: I plan to apply multiple retrospective case studies in different software startups that succeed or failed to pass the startup period and become a mature organization. Semi structured interviews will be used to collect data from the team who was involved in the software development in the startup era. Contribution: The outcome of this study will help software founders/entrepreneurs to make effective TD decisions during the startup timeframe; that can better contribute to the startup success and decrease the risk of the startup failure.