Early-stage startups and software maintenance: an undergraduate thesis documents the state of practice
Filipe Toyoshima Silva defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis mapping how early-stage startups handle software maintenance — a phase dominated by scarce resources and high change volume.
Brasília, November 18, 2021
Most of the literature on software maintenance implicitly assumes mature organizations. The undergraduate thesis defended by Filipe Toyoshima Silva in November 2021 goes the other way: it targets early-stage startups — those whose main challenge is to survive while validating the product — under the advising of Prof. Cristiane Soares Ramos .
The setting is peculiar. In early stage, startups combine low resource availability with an intense experimentation regime. Every week the product changes, target audience shifts, new features go in — and maintenance activity follows in tow. There is no budget for rewrites, but keeping what already ships alive grows in cost disproportionately.
The thesis documents how real teams navigate this scenario: which maintenance practices are preserved, which are adapted, which are simply dropped for lack of time. As a state-of-practice study, the work contributes to software architecture and digital transformation by giving visibility to decisions that rarely surface in academic literature.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.