A Survey on Implicit Requirements Management Practices in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Preliminary communication Effective requirements management that embraces both explicit and implicit aspects is a prerequisite for successful software development. Although different researchers and practitioners have identified the importance of implicit requirements (IMR) for overall successful outcome of software development, there is a need to correlate these theoretical assumptions about implicit requirements with the state of the practice. This paper empirically investigates the perception and handling of implicit requirements in small and medium-sized software organisations. The survey was undertaken through a web-based questionnaire to which 56 participants from 23 countries responded. The study found that critical organisational factors such as number of years in business of an organisation, the years of experience of an organisation in requirements engineering, and size of software development team have positive correlation with the perception and handling of implicit requirements within an organisation. It also recommends that a comparative evaluation of the existing support tools for implicit requirements is necessary in order to validate the potential of these tools to solve existing challenges, and determine gaps that still exist.