The agreement dimension in software requirements documentation

The notion of agreement is widely regarded as an essential aspect of the software requirements process, and sometimes as a vital ingredient of a software requirements specification. However, while some form of agreement must always be present in the requirements process, it is not necessarily documented as it is agreed. In fact, the amount and level of documented agreement on requirements varies from one type of development situation to another. This is one of the findings of a qualitative empirical study of the documentation practices of thirty requirements practitioners working in various organisational situations. This paper identifies three different varieties of requirements agreement distinguished in the actual requirements documents that were studied, and accounts for this variation in terms of the range of organisational situations in which requirements documentation is created and used.