Prioritizing Software Requirements With Kano Analysi
Quality function deployment is a powerful technique which enables companies to anticipate
and prioritize customer needs in their totality and to incorporate them effectively into the product and service provided for end users.
Kano Analysis is a light version or sub set of Q.F.D. and must start for prioritizing Requirements.
Dr. Noriaki Kano, developed an model to address the various ways in which Six Sigma practitioners could prioritize customer needs. This becomes important when trying to rank the customers wants and desires in a logical fashion.
The Practical Side to the Kano Model
The Kano model is a tool that can be used to prioritize the Critical to Quality characteristics, as defined by the Voice of the Customer. The three categories identified by the Kano model are:
Must Be: The quality characteristic must be present.
Performance: If this need are met, the Customer will be happy.
Delighter: Customer is delighted with unexpected benefits. Qualities that the customer was not expecting but received as a bonus.
Kano defined four categories into which each requirement can be classified.
Surprise and delight. Capabilities that differentiate a product or service from competitors.
More is better. Dimensions along a continuum with a clear direction of increasing utility.
Must be. Functional barriers to entrywithout these capabilities, Customers will not use the product.
Better not be. Represents things that dissatisfy customers
Surprise and delight requirements
We want software that is easy to use. The user interfaces that allow us to just do what comes naturally and have the software do exactly what we want. When converting from market requirements to product requirements, we can point our development to focus on innovative solutions to the right problems. The new features are aimed to surprise and delight customers.
More is better requirements
The challenge in writing a more is better requirement is in knowing when enough is enough. Requirements such as minimize or maximize are ambiguous. What is the theoretical minimum response time for a search engine? Does it take a few hundred micro-seconds for the bits to travel from the server to the user, plus a few micro-seconds for switch latency, plus a few nano-seconds for a CPU to find the answer? It would be completely impractical to unambiguously request that our developers minimize search time.
Quantification and affordability is a must. The law of diminishing returns comes into play. There is a concept in economics called utility which represents the tangible and intangible benefits of something. We can consider the utility of a feature with respect to the target users. A graph of the utility for speed of search-result generation would look like this:
As the speed of results increases, the incremental benefit to the user decreases. While utility is strictly increasing, it is increasing by less and less. When writing a requirement, how do we determine the speed that is truly required? It would be ambiguous to say as fast as possible or as fast as is reasonable. And it would be naive to think that we did not need to understand something about the implementation before specifying an unambiguous requirement.
This is the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis needed to specify the requirement. We have to iterate and interact with our development team to determine the impact of a speed specification on costs. After getting feedback from our implementation team, we now have an understanding of the cost of implementing search. Cost of Feature should be compared with benefit.
Must be requirements
Must be requirements are the easiest to elicit and are the ones that most people consider as real requirements.
Better not be requirements
This is the opposite of delight. Users dont like.
Apply the Kano techniques to make good prioritization decisions
1. Is in our first release all must be requirements are there.
2. When we specify more is better requirements.
Are they unambiguous
are they optimalor
At least practical?
More is better must not be unambiguous but optimal or practical
3. Any requirement that can delight or surprise the customer. Requirements that delight the customer will make an innovative product.
4. Must know the requirement that will irritate the customer.
Using Kano analysis to prioritize requirements
The first release of the software should primarily include must be requirements.
All of the must be requirements need to be included in the first release. If we could release the software without implementing features to support a must be requirement, then either no one will use the software, or the requirement is not a must be requirement.
Define and prioritize more is better requirements based on ROI
Optimal point is the point where additional investments in the measured characteristic are not offset by comparable gains, due to the law of diminishing returns.
The key to scheduling more is better requirements is to take advantage of the fact that they represent a continuum of performance and a continuum of benefit from that performance. Include a minimal amount of the requirement in the earliest release(s). The optimal amount can be added later. This can be called as requirement stagingor implementing in builds.
Surprise and delight requirements as differentiators
Delight features are valuable. When prioritizing delight requirements, we must consider our marketing strategy to determine the importance of the requirement. These types of features are most valuable when individuals are making purchasing decisions and products are sold more by word of mouth.
The increased expenses during preplanning enable more customer satisfaction product enhancement save the expenses on problem solving. The overall cost of quality is reduced. Companys brand valve is enhanced.
by: Narain Balchandani
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