ABSTRACT
Once customers’ needs are identified and ranked. Then, I developed a matrix to relate the what of a customer’s need to the how that need is satisfied in a product. In a traditional Design for Six Sigma methodology, developing the matrix of what’s against how’s is called quality function deployment (QFD). In the language of Agile, this may be called developing Epics and Stories. QFD has gained a wide degree of acceptance as a robust tool in the initial stages of requirements and concept development while Epics and Stories are more established in software development circles. In this chapter, we will conclude that by what ever name we call the approach, the design team needs to develop concepts that are acceptable to customers. This is an important step and is where using Agile for hardware development may significantly differ than using the same to develop software. The reason is that an element of traditional Agile is the flexibility of requirements. While this element may be easily accommodated in software, it will become significantly more difficult and costly in hardware development.
