MVP and experimentation in software startups: a qualitative survey

The Lean Startup methodology disseminated the concept of MVP. Since then, the term has been used in several contexts aside startups with a blur definition. Practitioners name several artifacts as MVPs, such as prototypes or initial versions of a new product, rather than an instrument for experimentation. Given the importance of experimentation to the success rate of software startups, it is essential to understand if the experimentation element is still present in practitioners’ understanding of the term and how they applied MVPs. To achieve this objective, we performed a survey with practitioners and coded their answers according to aspects found in a systematic mapping study on MVP. Our results indicate that MVP is mostly associated with the ideas of a product version and customer value rather than hypothesis testing and learning processes. Additionally, those respondents that focused on the first related group of terms did not give experiments as examples of MVP. In contrast, the opposite happened to those that used the second group.