Page - 209 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

Subconscious Requirements: The Fright of Every Tester 209 Fig. 1 The Kano model not notice it, so it does not affect satisfaction. On the other hand, when they are present, the customer will be pleasantly surprised: “delighters,” or in the terminologyofKano,“attractivequality.” One interesting observation by Kano was that requirements tend to change over time. New features start, almost by definition, as unconscious requirements. As customers discover, experience and like a new feature, it becomes a conscious requirement that is explicitly asked for. Gradually, as all similar and competitive systems implement the same feature, customers forget that originally systems did nothavesucha featureandstart to take it forgranted, turningit intoasubconscious requirement. That is why many systems contain features that users consider as indispensablewithoutknowingwhyand thuswithoutexplicitlyasking for them. A good example is the camera function on mobile phones, where this process took less than 20 years. The first time a camera was introduced as part of a phone, most customers were puzzled: no one had asked for this unconscious feature. But they liked it as a delighter and all brands started to implement it in their phones, turning it into a conscious requirement. Nowadays, when buying a new