QFD-PPP: Product Line Portfolio Planning Using Quality Function Deployment

In today’s competitive business environment, it is extremely important to offer customers exactly the products they want. Software product lines have the potential to enable companies to offer a larger variety of products while still being able to manage the complexity caused by this increased number of products. But offering a large number of variants does not necessarily mean increased profits, as many manufacturing companies noticed in the early 1990ies. The task of Product Portfolio Planning is to develop a portfolio of products that optimally satisfies customer demands and at the same time restricts the number of products offered. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a well-known and successfully used Quality Management method that can help companies identify true customer needs and the features needed to fulfil these needs. This paper demonstrates how QFD can be used for Product Portfolio Planning, thus offering potentially great benefits.