The leading edge in QFD for software and electronic business

In this article an overview of the state‐of‐the‐art of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) in software development or also called software QFD is given. The differences between classic QFD in manufacturing industries and software QFD are described. Following that certain software‐specific QFD models (Zultner, Shindo, Ohmori, Herzwurm and Schockert), which can be considered the most appreciated ones in theory as well as in practice, are introduced. Experiences in practice with these software QFD models are presented as well. Finally, through explaining the main principles of a special QFD variant for e‐commerce, called continuous QFD (CQFD), the article will show that QFD is suitable for planning electronic business applications as well.