Software quality deployment approach: framework design, methodology and example

To get closer to customer satisfaction with product quality, a quality deployment approach (QDA) has been widely practised, especially in the non-software domain, in Japan. The idea of QDA has been gradually applied to software since 1982, however, the framework for QDA is still immature. It is necessary to design a sound QDA framework for software, but this is not easy, because no guidelines for designing a QDA framework are provided. This paper, with a focus on customer-specific business software, presents a guideline for designing a QDA framework. The guideline will be applicable to other software classes, also. The key points in the guideline are: to understand QDA fundamental features; to clarify basic standpoints for the framework design; to select necessary relationship matrices; to develop and refine a matrix sequence diagram; to establish a procedural order for developing the relationship matrices; and to develop ways of using the relationship matrices. The guideline produces a QDA framework for customer-specific business software, which is of benefit to both the developer and the customer. This paper discusses it from a methodological point of view, and presents the ideas of consistency analysis, priority propagation, buying-points analysis and design-points analysis. Furthermore, it presents a concrete example of the QDA framework. The QDA framework has strong customer orientation. QDA is primarily a quality-focused approach. If incorporated in the software development, the QDA framework forces an explicit link between quality references and the functions and activities that relate to them, and it will be helpful for producing strongly customer-oriented and quality-focused software activities.