QFD on the Web

For those of you unfamiliar with the difficulty row on a House of Quality, it is used to rate a requirement in terms of its difficulty to accomplish….Before you decide that entering difficulty values in your QFD isn’t worth the effort required to do so, you should consider whether or not difficulty will affect your prioritization.

There are simple guidelines that can help QFD teams to construct models that will not only champion the voice of the customer, but that will be maintainable as well. Although these guidelines not as simple as cutting off requirements lists at an arbitrary number, the reward for following these procedures will be a sound Quality Function Deployment model that will increase communication, appropriately prioritize efforts, and assist in making sure that a product or service meets all of the needs of its customers.

Quality Function Deployment can help to quell many of the fears executives face when discussing a move to an Agile development methodology. It helps them to know that there is a plan in place for development, and that their development teams are not going to aimlessly add features to their applications as they see fit. (In actuality, a QFD is a type of long-range plan that outlines development for months or even years to come. It simply has extremely low over-head associated with modifying that plan on a frequent basis.) Additionally, it helps these stake holders to manage their feature pools from a high-level vantage point, without devoting endless hours to reviewing and re-reviewing individual features.