Requirements in the wild: How small companies do it

  • Jorge Aranda | Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto

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 their requirements management techniques and about their contexts of operations. In this talk I will present results from an ongoing exploratory case study of requirements management in 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. I will also present a number of hypotheses we developed to explain these findings.

Speaker Details

Jorge Aranda is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He studies the flow of information and the development of shared understanding in software teams.

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