People, Organizational and Technological Dimensions of Software Requirements Specification

A software specification can be defined as a short statement of the requirements that the software must assure. Through these requirements, software must provide facilities or capabilities to users, enabling them to achieve the specified organizational objectives. Nevertheless, the inappropriate specification of requirements is still considered one of the reasons for the failure of software development projects. One of the reasons that may explain this failure is that requirements specification tends to overvalue the technology side of requirements. Good requirements are only assured by the right combination of three dimensions: people, organization and technology. This paper reviews significant literature about software requirements management, particularly software requirements specification, identifying major issues and concerns. Through the lenses of each one of these three dimensions, several important facets of software requirements specification are analyzed, covering each of their main quality attributes. Implications for future research are discussed. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of CENTERIS/HCIST.