Page - 162 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

162 M.F. Tannian Achieving embracing quality requires understanding user needs and desires as well as their environmental contexts, and accommodating these understandings within the development practice. Quality function deployment (QFD) introduced by Shigeru Mizuno and Yoji Akao sensitized designers to the needs of the customer, and this practice helped introduce the term “voice of the customer.” The QFD approach brings customer satisfaction forward early into manufacturing or developmentprocesses [1]. Another approach to understanding the user is inspired and informedby the designcommunity.This approachis called“design thinking.” In the next section, a brief expansion on embracing quality is presented. The following section will introduce design thinking. The fourth section will describe design thinking’s role in bringing about embracing quality. The fifth section raises potentialchallengesrelatedtodesignthinking.Thefinalsectionwillendthechapter with someconcludingthoughts. 2 EmbracingQuality Embracing quality is a convergence quality that emerges from other emergent qualities, such as reliability, security, privacy, usability, and performance. For our purposes, a convergencequality is a quality that results from the integration of the userwiththeproductorservice.Theusercompletesthetechnologyandtheresulting combination achieves desired value. The synergy between technology and user is suchthat theuserfindsgreatsatisfaction,enjoyment,andmayevenexperienceflow [2]fromusingthis technology.Thissynergymayallowtheuser to functionas if the technologywereanextensionofherorhim. Embracingasaquality isnotstaticandthe levelof thisqualityachievedmaynot be universal within a market. Culture strongly influences taste, aesthetics, personal values as well as the verbal and nonverbal means by which we communicate. A product or service that achieves embracing quality within a market may lose it over time. Certainly the opposite may happen where a product achieves greater embracing quality in the future. Product and service qualities such as reliability, fitness-for-purpose,security,usability,andperformancechangeduetodevelopment practices and external factors, such as market changes, cultural sensitivities, and security threat landscapes. These are significant reasons for why innovation and quality assurance are necessary to achieveembracingquality. This chapter will not explore how to measure or define the gradations within embracing. Suffice it to say that embracing is not strictly a binary value (i.e., rejected or embraced). Some examplesofproductsandservicesthathaveachievedembracingatonepoint intheir historyareWordPerfect,Sonic theHedgehog,Apple iPhone,andUber. Embracing quality is an outcome that is dependent upon a product or service exhibiting sufficient levels of product or service quality as deemed important by users. ISO25010:2011callsout thefollowingassystemorsoftwareproductquality dimensions: functional suitability, performance efficiency, compatibility, usability, reliability, security,maintainability, andportability [3]. Figure 1 depicts an alterna-