Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it

Small companies form a large part of the software industry, but have mostly been overlooked by the requirements engineering research community. We know very little about the techniques these companies use to elicit and track requirements and about their contexts of operations. This paper presents preliminary results from an ongoing exploratory case study of requirements management in seven small companies, which found that (a) successful small companies exhibit a huge diversity of requirements practices that work well enough for their contexts; (b) these companies display strong cultural cohesion; (c) the principal of the company tends to retain control of the requirements processes long after other tasks have been delegated, and (d) the evidence rejects the simplistic view of a current "software crisis", as requirements errors for these companies, though problematic, are rarely catastrophic. We develop a number of hypotheses to explain these findings.