  Today's significant technological advancement allows early-stage software
startups to build and launch innovative products quickly on the market.
However, many of them die in the early years of their path due to market
conditions, ignorance of customer needs, lack of resources, or focus, such as
the misuse of well-established practices. The study's motivation is to analyze
software engineering practices in startups from a practitioner's perspective.
Our objective was to identify practices and tools the startups employ in their
daily routines. We carried out an expert survey study with 140 software
developers involved in software startups from different domains. The results
show that startups in the initial and validation phases select practices and
tools on an ad-hoc basis and based on the development team's prior knowledge.
When they move into the growth phase, they recognize that they could have
adopted better practices beforehand to support product scaling with a more
mature team. The results also indicated that support tools are selected based
on their integration with other tools and their ability to automate operational
activities.
