Requirements for Measurement Dashboards and their Benefits: A study of Start-ups in East Africa Grace Kamulegeya Networks Departement Makerere University Kampala, Uganda gkamulegeya@cit.ac.ug Raymond Mugwanya Information Technology Department Makerere University Kampala, Uganda rmugwanya@cit.ac.ug Regina Hebig CSE Department Chalmers | Univeristy of Gothenburg Gothenburg, Sweden regina.hebig@cse.gu.se Abstract—Context Metrics, often visualized with dashboards, are considered crucial to help software start-ups focus on the right aspects during the first years. However, as our previous research indicates, metric choices in emerging ecosystems are not necessarily the same as in literature, which mostly focuses on developed countries. More knowledge is required to provide dashboards that suite East African software startups. Goal The aim of this study is to identify key requirements for measurement dashboards for early software start-ups that can be used to monitor the daily health of a start-up and how these dashboards are expected to benefit the start-ups. Method We performed semi-structured interviews with 38 soft- ware start-ups in Uganda and Kenya to identify and categorise requirements for measurement dashboards as well as hopes associated to the use of such dashboard. Results Our results show that most start-ups want measurements dashboards to visualise performance. Index Terms—software start-up, measurement, dashboard. I. I NTRODUCTION Measurement is an activity that exists in the businesses and technical domains. Being an important activity that helps in informing technical, business and administrative decisions, domains such as xxxx have devised ways to standardize and simplify it by adopting tools. One of the most popular approaches to simplifying mea- surement is to employ dashboards. Several descriptions of dashboards exist but generally, they are tools that provide reporting on data through visualizations and aid in informed decision making and monitoring of organisations. Dashboards have a wide range of uses in companies that include quality monitoring [1], performance management [2] and measure- ments for design of large-scale systems [3]. Dashboards have been widely adopted in mature businesses to provide reporting on sales, performance and financial management. In technical businesses, they are used for monitoring of quality through measurements on addition to the business aspects. Our earlier study [4] around East Africa confirmed that early software start-ups are measuring aspects of their business and technical operations. However, the start-ups are not using ex- isting dashboards to measure their progress in as much as they believe that measurements will benefit them. The few that use dashboards, focus mainly on customer-related measurements. Consequently, given their unique nature as young businesses with widely known challenges, existing dashboards are not able to support many software start-ups with measurements that can help them gauge their progress. Failure of software companies is not only attributed to an engineering perspective but also business perspective taking into consideration things like resources, capabilities and busi- ness activities. This makes them unique in a sense that we cannot look at them with just the engineering but also the business lens. Measurement standards and tools must take into consideration their unique nature for them to realise the already existing full advantages of measuring in the mature engineering fields. Our main goal is to study the requirements for measure- ment dashboards in various early software start-ups and their perceived benefits. In this study, we investigate how start-ups would use mea- surements dashboards to measure their progress as well as their expected benefits. We did not present results for these two questions. In the second study, we targeted other questions and interviewed more start-ups about the two earlier questions. The extra questions in the second study will help us in future work involving the designing, implementing and testing of a measurement dashboard for early start-ups in East Africa. The second study also enabled us to capture more dashboard requirements and formed a basis to motivate the develop of a measurement dashboard in future work. In this paper, we report our findings about the perceived use of measurement dashboards and the expected benefits of using them in startups for measuring their progress. This paper is organised as follows. In section II we discuss dashboards use in general, within software firms and dash- boards for measuring progress, in section III we describe the methodology we use, in section IV we present the results, in section V, we discuss the key findings of the study, in section VI highlight the major threats to validity of our results. In section VII, we conclude and mention the future work to this study. II. RELATED WORK In this section, we present related studies to dashboards technologies and their general use and use in software mea- surements, the measurement standards and existing frame-