A decision framework for software startups to succeed in COVID-19 environment

The world is witnessing a pandemic of a severe infectious nature known as COVID-19. Many countries have used partial or complete lockdown to slow the spread of the virus, which has devastated the economies all over the world, and made hundreds of millions of people unemployed overnight. The lockdown measures and work from home practices as a response to the spread of the new coronavirus threaten the existence of many innovative startups. In fact, many software startups are either with no projects on hand and only a few of them are able to attract customers for even maintenance projects. In this paper, we provide a decision framework to help software startups choose projects which will increase their chance of success given their historically low success rate and diminished level of IT investment.