Software start-up failures are often explained with poor business model, market issues, insufficient funding, or simply a bad product idea. However, inadequacies in software product engineering are relatively little explored and could be a significant contributing factor to high start-up failure rate. In this paper we present analysis of 88 start-up experience reports. The analysis is presented in a form of three anti-patterns illustrating common symptoms, actual causes, and potential countermeasures of engineering inadequacies. The three anti-patterns are: product uncertainty comprising of issues in requirements engineering, poor product quality comprising of inadequacies in product quality, and team breakup comprising of team issues. The anti-patterns show that challenges and failure scenarios that appear to be business or market-related can actually originate from inadequacies in product engineering.

翻译：软件初创企业的失败往往归因于商业模式不佳、市场问题、资金不足或产品创意糟糕。然而，软件产品工程方面的缺陷却鲜少被探讨，而这可能是导致初创企业高失败率的一个重要因素。本文分析了88份初创企业经验报告，以三种反模式的形式呈现分析结果，揭示了工程缺陷的常见症状、实际成因及潜在应对措施。这三种反模式分别是：由需求工程问题引发的产品不确定性、由产品质量缺陷引发的低劣产品质量、以及由团队问题引发的团队分裂。这些反模式表明，看似与商业或市场相关的挑战和失败场景，其根源实则可能来自产品工程层面的缺陷。