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.