Eliciting Requirements - what are basic requirements for Quality Function Deployment ? PART 2

Quality function deployment defines requirements in a way that maximizes the customer satisfaction. Quality function deployment is used to translate customer requirements to engineering specifications. It is a link between customers, design engineers, competitors and manufacturing. QFD is important as it gives importance to the customer and put these values in engineering process. There is a proper time to use quality function deployment. It is used in early phases of design. It can also be used as a planning tool as important areas are identified.

Quality function deployment contains four phases:
- product planning
- product design
- process planning
- production planning

The benefits of QFD includes better understanding of customer needs, reduces iterations in design and enhancing teamwork. There are three types of requirements that are defined by QFD:
- Normal requirements are a mirror of objectives that are stated for a product during meetings with the customer. Normal requirements include graphical displays,specific system levels.
- Expected requirements are requirements that are fundamental and customer does not explicitly state them but their absence will create a significant dissatisfaction. These include ease of software installation and human/machine interaction etc.
- Exciting requirements are the requirements that do not fall within customer's expectations but are very satisfying when they are present.

What are concepts of Requirements Engineering? Different tasks of requirement engineering - Inception and Elicitation.

Requirement Engineering encompasses a set of tasks that lead to an understanding of what the business impact of the software will be, what the customer wants, and how end-user will interact with the software. The basic agreement between end-users and developers on what the software should do is given by requirement engineering.

It gives stakeholders anopportunity to define their requirements understandable to the development team. Designing and building an elegant computer program that solves the wrong problem is a waste. This is the reason why it is important to understand what customer wants before one begins to design and build a computer-based system. Requirements Engineering builds a bridge to design and construction.

There are seven distinct tasks to requirements engineering namely inception, elicitation, elaboration, negotiation, specification, validation and management.

INCEPTION

At inception, the problem scope and its nature is defined.
To initiate requirement engineering, steps include:
- identify stakeholders.
- recognize multiple viewpoints.
- work towards collaboration.
- ask the first question.
The main output or work product of inception task is a one or two pages of
product request which is a paragraph summary of the problem and its nature.

Elicitation

Elicitation is a task that helps the customer define what is required. The problems encountered are problems of scope, problems of understanding, problems of volatility. Elicitation makes use of a requirements elicitation format that combines the elements of problem solving, elaboration, negotiation, and specification.
Joint Application Development is one collaborative requirement gathering technique that is popularly used to elicit requirements.
The tasks involved in elicitation can be categorized into three groups, namely, pre-joint meeting tasks, joint meeting tasks and post-joint meeting tasks.

Quality Function Deployment is a technique that emphasizes an understanding of what is valuable to the customer. It identifies three types of requirements normal requirements, expected requirements and exciting requirements.

The output of the elicitation task can vary depending on size of thesystem or product to be built. For most systems, the output or work products include a statement of need and feasibility, a bounded statement of scope for the system or product, a list of customer, users, and other stakeholders who participated in requirements elicitation, a description of the system's technical environment and a priority list of requirements, preferably, in terms of functions, objects and domain constraints that apply to each.