December 2000
Volume 3 • Number 1

Contents

DEVELOPMENT METHODS
Achieving Customer Satisfaction Using Evolutionary Processes

Achieving and measuring customer satisfaction is a key aim in systems development. Widespread customer satisfaction, however, is not normally attained, largely because of inadequate understanding of requirements and quality-related issues. This lack of understanding is a function of the semantic gap between customers and developers during system evolution. A universal customer-oriented evolutionary life-cycle process is required to support the through-life attainment of customer satisfaction by minimizing barriers to any quest for common understanding, for example, of need, requirements, process, and product quality.

This article describes a process improvement case study and an associated experiment to explore how to achieve customer satisfaction using a through-life requirements-driven evolutionary process. A customer satisfaction reference model was developed to derive the idealized requirements for such a customer-oriented process. An experiment was undertaken to examine the cost effectiveness and customer-friendly attributes of the Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) that was chosen as a candidate for evaluation as a customer-oriented process. The overall progress toward a customer-oriented process requirement, together with some positive observations about DSDM, was considered an effective study result. The study’s lessons learned provide information to help further customer satisfaction studies.

Key words: customer satisfaction, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), evolutionary development, process evaluation, process improvement, product quality, system measurement

by John Elliott, Systems and Software Engineering Center, U. K. Defence Evaluation and Research Agency

INTRODUCTION

One goal of businesses is to achieve a continuous and high level of customer satisfaction in the delivery of services and/or products. Such satisfaction is believed to be the basis of long-term profitability and growth. In the realm of computer-based system products, customer satisfaction is dependent on how system development projects evolve to build operational product systems that satisfy perceived and actual customer needs and associated system requirements.

Ultimately, successful customer satisfaction depends on the depth of “through-life” understanding of the business need, user requirements and product quality assurance for a future system, and the ability of customers and developers to communicate and negotiate these understandings. In particular, customer satisfaction and confidence depends on the level of system assurance offered throughout the system development life cycle that the resulting product will be fit for its purpose. Furthermore, requirement-understanding problems inevitably lead to poor customer-supplier relationships, unnecessary reworks, and overruns. In fact, great gains to both customers and developers are available with improved understanding of requirements and quality issues. Achieving these gains stimulates the vision of this customer-oriented process case study.

This article describes a process improvement case study and associated experiment whose main thrust was to improve customer satisfaction using a new style of evolutionary life-cycle process. This process will pay due regard to requirement issues and other quality-related aspects.