Defining Customer Needs for Brand New Products by Richard Zultner, Zultner & Company, USA. Is it useful to have an approach for products the customer has never seen before (as opposed to model upgrades)? This paper will review the existing approaches in QFD for brand new products, and discuss the Theory of Constraints "Snowflake" and "3 Clouds" methods for finding the customer's core problem, and core conflict, respectively. This will show the synergy between TOC and QFD as well (tweaking the deal vs. tweaking the details).

Developing Multimedia Integrated Circuit Solutions Using Customer Integrated Decision Making (CIDM) by Carrie Richardson of Motorola (USA) and Bill Barnard of Barnard-Norman Associates (USA). This is a case study involving an internationally located team using CIDM to interview customers and focus on value and choice in order to arrive at technical specifications for multimedia solutions, leading to the development of an integrated circuit, its software and development tools.

Making the Millennium Decision: Applying QFD to the year 2000 Century Change Issue by William J. Jagrowski, Andersen Consulting; Robert L. Pike, Consumers Power Company (USA). The century change date poses one of the greatest development challenges ever for software engineering. Literally, billions of lines of software code will have to be evaluated and extended pulling developers away from developing new software products. This lost production may never be regained. QFD has helped a major utility develop its strategy for next few years to cope. The case study offers an example of how QFD and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) techniques can be used to facilitate a decision facing a company grappling with legacy system obsolescence, including the Year 2000 problem.

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Business Process Reengineering with Quality Function Deployment-Process Innovation for Software Development, R.E. Zultner, CQE, Zultner and Company.  Many software organizations are considering Business Process Reengineering (BPR) to dramatically improve their core business process - software development. There are great risks associated with such reengineering efforts, and QFD can help by supplying a value-driven comprehensive framework, with powerful tools and techniques. An approach for applying BPR with QFD to the software development process is described, and two case studies reviewed.

Integrating QFD with Object-Oriented Software Design Methodologies, Walter M. Lamia, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.  Object-oriented methodologies have emerged as a popular paradigm for software design and analysis, both in research and practice. Several variants of Object-oriented methods are in use, but they all share significant similarities in their approaches to modeling the application domain. QFD is also a design analysis and domain modeling technique with many parallels to Object-oriented methods. This paper gives an overview of Object Oriented design concepts, and shows how familiar QFD techniques are an effective aid for the Object-oriented analyst. QFD is a much easier way to approach to the initial information collection and provides easy to understand structuring tools that do not require extensive training in Object-oriented concepts and methods.

Defining the Unknown Customer Wants and Needs- Applying the Reflector Method into QFD, Noriyuki Neil Takeuchi Integrated Quality Dynamics, Inc.  In software development, quality requirements frequently change depending on the wants and needs of the customer. Once a durable system has been decided upon, the specifications will ultimately transform. The Reflector is a new method for QFD that defines the demanded quality items perfectly with the voice of the customer analysis. It develops he necessary information, such as demanded quality and function based on the customer voice, which is defined by the mirror that can cast future customers' wants and needs. This paper introduced how to use the Reflector in the QFD software field.

Quality Function Deployment - Integrating Product Development into the Systems Development Process, Mark P. McDonald, Andersen Consulting.  This paper examines the need for incorporating product development activities related to customer satisfaction into the software development process. QFD is an established technique for understanding and satisfying customers that is readily applicable to software development. This paper provides an overview of QFD, its role in the systems development process and an example for study. The case study offers an example of how this advanced quality technique applies to software development.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD): An Effective Technique For Requirements Acquisition, Tuyet-Lan Tran and Joseph S. Sherif, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Software Assurance, California Institute of Technology.   A general accepted understanding of how to capture requirements, allocate or flow-down top level requirements, verify and validate lower level requirements is not rigorously sought in practice. Often the customers are blamed for not properly articulating their requirements or understanding their own needs. However, the problem is deeper than that, and it involves not only the customers but also the system analysts or engineers, and designers as well. This paper puts forward QFD as an effective tool for the acquisition of customer requirements.