Context: The higher availability of software usage data and the influence of the Lean Startup led to the rise of experimentation in software engineering, a new approach for development based on experiments to understand the user needs. In the models proposed to guide this approach, the first step is generally to identify, prioritize, and specify the hypotheses that will be tested through experimentation. However, although practitioners have proposed several techniques to handle hypotheses, the scientific literature is still scarce. Objective: The goal of this study is to understand what activities, as proposed in industry, are entailed to handle hypotheses, facilitating the comparison, creation, and evaluation of relevant techniques. Methods: We performed a gray literature review (GLR) on the practices proposed by practitioners to handle hypotheses in the context of software startups. We analyzed the identified documents using thematic synthesis. Results: The analysis revealed that techniques proposed for software startups in practice compress five different activities: elicitation, prioritization, specification, analysis, and management. It also showed that practitioners often classify hypotheses in types and which qualities they aim for these statements. Conclusion: Our results represent the first description for hypotheses engineering grounded in practice data. This mapping of the state-of-practice indicates how research could go forward in investigating hypotheses for experimentation in the context of software startups. For practitioners, they represent a catalog of available practices to be used in this context.

背景信息：软件使用数据的更高可用性以及“精益创业”的影响导致了软件工程实验的兴起，这是一种基于实验的新开发方法，可以理解用户需求。在建议用来指导这种方法的模型中，第一步通常是识别，确定优先级并指定将通过实验进行检验的假设。但是，尽管从业者提出了几种处理假设的技术，但是科学文献仍然很少。目的：本研究的目的是了解行业中提议进行哪些活动来处理假设，促进比较，创建和评估相关技术。方法：我们对从业者提出的在软件初创企业中处理假设的实践进行了灰色文献综述（GLR）。我们使用主题综合分析了已识别的文档。结果：分析表明，在实践中为软件初创公司提议的技术可压缩五种不同的活动：启发，优先级划分，规范，分析和管理。它也表明，从业人员经常将假设分类为类型，以及他们针对这些陈述要达到的质量。结论：我们的结果代表了基于实践数据的假设工程的第一个描述。实践状态的这种映射指示了在软件初创企业的背景下，如何进行研究假设的研究。对于从业者，他们代表了在这种情况下要使用的可用实践的目录。