Digital Mentor: towards a conversational bot to identify hypotheses for software startups

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Digital Mentor, a conversational bot designed to assist software startup founders in creating hypotheses through HyMap, reducing reliance on human facilitators and supporting evidence-based experimentation.

Contribution

It presents the design and development of a novel conversational bot that automates the HyMap process for startups, enhancing hypothesis identification in uncertain contexts.

Findings

Prototype of the Digital Mentor developed

Initial challenges in natural language understanding addressed

Next steps include user testing and refinement

Abstract

Software startups develop innovative, software-intensive product and services. This context leads to uncertainty regarding the software they are building. Experimentation, a process of testing hypotheses about the product, helps these companies to reduce uncertainty through different evidence-based approaches. The first step in experimentation is to identify the hypotheses to be tested. HyMap is a technique where a facilitator helps a software startup founder to draw a cognitive map representing her understanding of the context and, based on that, create hypotheses about the software to be built. In this paper, we present the Digital Mentor, an working-in-progress conversational bot to help creating a HyMap without the need of a human facilitator. We report the proposed solution consisting of a web application with the backend of a natural language understanding system, the current state of development, the challenges we faced so far and the next steps we plan to move forward.