A flexible and pragmatic requirements engineering framework for SME

Convincing organizations to improve their software development processes is difficult. It becomes even more difficult for smaller firms, as they have smaller margins for improvement work and most likely lack the in-house competence to make improvements. Based on the experience from smaller and medium-sized companies, a flexible and pragmatic process improvement framework for the requirements engineering process was developed, specifically focused on the situations of smaller firms. The background and motivation is presented, including why existing methods such as CMM are not appropriate in our context. Initial experience and initial evaluation of the developed framework are also presented. It can be concluded that the developed framework has gained acceptance by our evaluation partners and that we were able to perform a process improvement with a relatively small amount of effort.