Selecting requirements documentation techniques for software projects: A survey study

Abstract

A significant number of techniques dedicated to requirements specification and documentation is described in the available sources. As there is no purpose to use all of them, a selection has to be made, taking into consideration the context of a given software project, for example its size, usage of agile approach or stakeholders' technical competency. This paper is intended to provide guidelines for such selection. We reviewed several sources (mainly industrial standards) to identify the general approach to requirements specification and specific techniques they recommend for this purpose. We also proposed a set of attributes describing project's context. Then, we conducted a survey study involving 42 Polish IT industry professionals, asking them to select techniques applicable to different projects. The survey was followed by two interviews with exerienced business analysts to interpret its results. The main contribution of the paper are selection recommendations based on results of survey and interviews.