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In the era of digital transformation, the notion of software quality transcends its traditional boundaries, necessitating an expansion to encompass the realms of value creation for customers and the business. Merely optimizing technical aspects of software quality can result in diminishing returns. Product discovery techniques can be seen as a powerful mechanism for crafting products that align with an expanded concept of quality - one that incorporates value creation. Previous research has shown that companies struggle to determine appropriate product discovery techniques for generating, validating, and prioritizing ideas for new products or features to ensure they meet the needs and desires of the customers and the business. For this reason, we conducted a grey literature review to identify various techniques for product discovery. First, the article provides an overview of different techniques and assesses how frequently they are mentioned in the literature review. Second, we mapped these techniques to an existing product discovery process from previous research to provide concrete guidelines for establishing product discovery in their organizations. The analysis shows, among other things, the increasing importance of techniques to structure the problem exploration process and the product strategy process. The results are interpreted regarding the importance of the techniques to practical applications and recognizable trends.
Context
In a world of high dynamics and uncertainties, it is almost impossible to have a long-term prediction of which products, services, or features will satisfy the needs of the customer. To counter this situation, the conduction of Continuous Improvement or Design Thinking for product discovery are common approaches. A major constraint in conducting product discovery activities is the high effort to discover and validate features and requirements. In addition, companies struggle to integrate product discovery activities into their agile processes and iterations.
Objective
This paper aims at suggests a supportive tool, the “Discovery Effort Worthiness (DEW) Index”, for product owners and agile teams to determine a suitable amount of effort that should be spent on Design Thinking activities. To operationalize DEW, proposals for practitioners are presented that can be used to integrate product discovery into product development and delivery.
Method
A case study was conducted for the development of the DEW index. In addition, we conducted an expert workshop to develop proposals for the integration of product discovery activities into the product development and delivery process.
Results
First, we present the "Discovery Effort Worthiness Index" in form of a formula. Second, we identified requirements that must be fulfilled for systematic integration of product discovery activities into product development and delivery. Third, we derived from the requirements proposals for the integration of product discovery activities with a company's product development and delivery.
Conclusion
The developed "Discovery Effort Worthiness Index" provides a tool for companies and their product owners to determine how much effort they should spend on Design Thinking methods to discover and validate requirements. Integrating product discovery with product development and delivery should ensure that the results of product discovery are incorporated into product development. This aims to systematically analyze product risks to increase the chance of product success.
Large critical systems, such as those created in the space domain, are usually developed by a large number of organizations and, furthermore, they have to comply with standards. Yet, the different stakeholders often do not have a common understanding of the needed quality of requirements specifications. Achieving such a common understanding is a laborious process that is currently not sufficiently supported. Moreover, such a common understanding must be aligned with the standards. In this paper, we present an approach that can be used to align the different stakeholder perceptions regarding the quality of requirements specifications. Existing quality models for requirements specifications are analyzed for equivalences, and transferred into a common representation, the so-called Aligned Quality Map (AQM). Furthermore, a process is defined that supports the alignment of different stakeholder perspectives with regard to the quality of requirements specifications using AQM, which is validated in a case study in the context of European space projects. AQM has been created and populated with an initial set of quality models. It is designed in such way that it can be extended to include further quality models. The case study has shown that an alignment of different stakeholder perspectives and the quality model of the European Cooperation for Space Standardization using AQM is feasible. The approach allows for aligning different stakeholder perspectives for a common understanding of the quality of requirements specifications in the context of standards. Furthermore, AQM supports the assessment of requirements specifications.