Requirements Management for Continuous Software Product Development

Background: Continuous software product development is increasingly becoming the norm. New requirements come in a constant stream and need to be assigned to projects to make it into a release. However, in the literature requirements management practices are project based and no longer naturally fit to this new setting. Aim: Thus, it is of interest to understand the industrial practices for the identification of requirements and associated artifacts put under configuration control. Method: An industrial survey with five companies was conducted to find out these industrial practices. Results: The results of this survey show that with the need to manage more requirements also comes the need for greater control. Large companies, however, often place similar control on products of all size. Moreover, regardless of size and requirements management practices, companies face the same problems. Conclusions: All companies should keep requirements associated material under some form of control and updates to them should be communicated to the involved stakeholders and should be easy to access. The type of associated artifacts kept under control can be decided by the criteria given.