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. ER -