Quality Function Deployment (QFD): an effective technique for requirements acquisition and reuse

Abstract

This paper proposes Quality Function Deployment (QFD) as an effective tool for the capture and refinement of requirements. When applied to a project, QFD will enable its success. More specifically, QFD will: (1) improve product quality by focusing on customer requirements up-front and throughout the development cycle; (2) improve communications between customers, system engineers, programmers and testers and thus contribute to a better decision-making process; (3) facilitate the management of change, through rigorous rating and systematic traceability of requirements; (4) reduce costs of projects, by enabling concurrent engineering and by reducing costs associated with late-in-the life-cycle rework, (5) enable alignment between customer requirements, product requirements, and cost requirements (or constraints), and (6) enable cataloguing of key performance requirements, for parameter-based modeling of the target application and systematic reuse of requirements across projects.