Recognizing Software Engineering Difficulties in Software SMEs

Abstract

SSMEs, or small and medium-sized software enterprises, play a critical role in developing economies. They cannot adopt automated software engineering tools or advanced software engineering techniques in the same way as large and ultra-large companies due to their size. Utilising semi-structured interviews with four SSMEs, we investigate the software engineering challenges faced by SME's in Thailand, an emerging software development market. Following a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, we identified several recurring problems, including inadequate testing, code-related problems, and imprecise effort estimation. We found that SSMEs must embrace modern software engineering best practices like automated testing, continuous integration, and automated code review in order to implement sophisticated automated software engineering tools and procedures.