Towards a new understanding of small and medium sized enterprises in requirements engineering research

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Almost worldwide the software industry mainly consists of small and medium software enterprises. From a requirements engineering perspective these companies are poorly researched. [Problem] Though RE research is discovering SMEs as an interesting field, it is difficult to categorize and distinguish these companies sufficiently. This leads to a) weakly classified results of observational studies as well as field studies and empirical research and b) insufficient mappings between methodical improvements and the companies they can be applied to. Therefore, it is hard for researchers and enterprises to adopt RE state of the art to an enterprises environment. [Principal ideas] After defining the problem, initial ideas for attributes classifying SMEs are presented and a way for improving and clustering these attributes is shown. [Contribution] This paper raises an important problem statement for RE research and shows an initial way towards solving this problem. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.