Software startup companies develop innovative, software-intensive products within limited time frames and with few resources, searching for sustainable and scalable business models. Software startups are quite distinct from traditional mature software companies, but also from micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, introducing new challenges relevant for software engineering research. This paper's research agenda focuses on software engineering in startups, identifying, in particular, 70+ research questions in the areas of supporting startup engineering activities, startup evolution models and patterns, ecosystems and innovation hubs, human aspects in software startups, applying startup concepts in non-startup environments, and methodologies and theories for startup research. We connect and motivate this research agenda with past studies in software startup research, while pointing out possible future directions. While all authors of this research agenda have their main background in Software Engineering or Computer Science, their interest in software startups broadens the perspective to the challenges, but also to the opportunities that emerge from multi-disciplinary research. Our audience is therefore primarily software engineering researchers, even though we aim at stimulating collaborations and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries. We believe that with this research agenda we cover a wide spectrum of the software startup industry current needs.

翻译：软件初创企业通过有限的时间和资源开发创新型、软件密集型产品，并寻求可持续且可扩展的商业模式。这类企业与传统的成熟软件公司存在显著差异，也与微型、小型和中型企业有所不同，为软件工程研究引入了全新挑战。本文的研究议程聚焦于初创企业中的软件工程领域，特别明确了70余个研究问题，涵盖以下方向：支持初创工程活动、初创企业演化模型与模式、生态系统与创新中心、软件初创中的人因因素、初创概念在非初创环境中的应用，以及面向初创研究的方法论与理论。我们通过回顾软件初创领域的既有研究，为这一研究议程建立关联并提供理论支撑，同时指出未来潜在的研究方向。尽管本议程的所有作者主要背景均为软件工程或计算机科学，但对软件初创企业的兴趣使我们能够从多学科视角审视机遇与挑战。因此，我们的主要目标受众是软件工程研究者，尽管我们希望促进跨学科合作与交叉研究。我们相信，这一研究议程能够全面覆盖当前软件初创行业的迫切需求。