Group decision making to better respond to customer needs in software development

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a well-known planning methodology for translating customer needs into relevant design and production requirements. The intent of applying QFD is to incorporate the voice of the customer into the various phases of the product development cycle for a new product, or a new version of an existing product. The traditional QFD structure requires individuals to express their preferences in a restricted scale without exceptions. In practice, people contributing to the process tend generally to give information about their personal preferences in many different ways, numerically or linguistically, depending on their background. Moreover, collaborative decision-making is not an emphasized issue in QFD even though it requires several people's involvement. In this study, we extend the QFD methodology by introducing a new group decision making approach that takes into account multiple preference formats and fusing different expressions into one uniform group decision by means of fuzzy set theory. An application on software development is supplied to illustrate the approach.