SOFTWARE QUALITY FUNCTION DEPLOYMENT - Software Design for Six-Sigma: A Roadmap for Excellence - page 321

The DFSS team should conduct a customer evaluation study. This is hard to do
in new design situations. Customer evaluation is conducted to assess how well the
current or proposed design delivers on the needs and desires of the end user. The
most frequently used method for this evaluation is to ask the customer (e.g., focus
group or a survey) how well the software design project is meeting each customer's
expectations. To leap ahead of the competition, the DFSS team must also understand
the evaluation and performance of their toughest competition. In the HOQ 1, the
team has the opportunity to grasp and compare, side by side, how well the current,
proposed, or competitive design solutions are delivering on customer needs.
The objective of the HOQ 1 Room 2 evaluation is to broaden the team's strategic
choices for setting targets for the customer performance goals. For example, armed
with meaningful customer desires, the team could aim their efforts at either the
strengths or the weaknesses of best-in-class competitors, if any. In another choice,
the team might explore other innovative avenues to gain competitive advantages.
The list of customer wants and needs should include all types of the customer as
well as the regulatory requirements and the social and environmental expectations.
It is necessary to understand the requirements and prioritization similarities and
differences to understand what can be standardized and what needs to be tailored.
Customer wants and needs, in HOQ1, social, and other company wants can be
refined in a matrix format for each identified market segment. The “customer im-
portance rating” in Room #1 is the main driver for assigning priorities from both
the customer's and the corporate perspectives, as obtained through direct or indirect
engagement forms with the customer.
The traditional method of conducting the Kano model is to ask functional and
dysfunctional questions around known wants/needs or CTSs. Functional questions
take the form of “How do you feel if the 'CTS' is present in the software?” Dysfunc-
tional questions take the form of “How do you feel if the 'CTS' is NOT present in the
software?” Collection of this information is the first step, and then detailed analysis
is required beyond the scope of this topic. For a good reference on processing the
voice of the customer, see Burchill et al. (1997).
In the Kano analysis plot, the y-axis consists of the Kano model dimensions of
must be, one-dimensional, and delighters. The top item, indifferent, is where the
customer chooses opposite items in the functional and dysfunctional questions. The
x-axis is based on the importance of the CTSs to the customer. This type of plot can
be completed from the Kano model or can be arranged qualitatively by the design
team, but it must be validated by the customer, or we will fall into the trap of voice
of the engineer again.

12.8 QFD HOQ 2: TRANSLATION HOUSE

The customer requirements are then converted to a technical and measurable set of
metrics, the CTSs, of the software product. For example, “easy to learn” may be
converted to “time to complete the tutorial,” “number of icons,” and “number of
online help facilities.” It is important to note here that some customer requirements