Requirements Practice: What Matters to Small Businesses that Develop Packaged Software?

This paper presents preliminary findings from a grounded theory study of managing changes to packaged software. Our aim is to develop a process theory that describes how developers resolve their main concern of managing a single product vision in a context where that product must suit diverse customer needs. The theory provides an alternate understanding of why traditional requirements engineering methods are not perceived as useful. The process theory developed here describes the interaction of the reciprocal processes of sense-making and influencing with contextual conditions and outcomes in order to explain how the participants resolve their main concern.