Various organisations have published proposals to prescribe the form and content of software requirements specification documents; the standards were designed to support: the specific needs of these organisations and the intricacies of their development projects. To help third parties in taking advantage of this body of work, a set of criteria are proposed and discussed that can be used to evaluate such standards, according to the unique characteristics of specific combinations of organisations and software development projects, and then the question of how the criteria can be applied in an evaluation, selection and tailoring process, depending on the circumstances, is discussed. Finally, the criteria are demonstrated by applying them on some published standards, to help interested organisations to preselect those that seem most appropriate for their needs.
