Agile Software Development

The series of Kano-model related posts published on this web-site has been noticed and referenced in the Christmas 2006 edition of the Carnival of Agilists - the blogroll about latest thoughts in the agile community.

What a nice Christmas present!

On a side note:
Even though at the moment I am the only one posting to AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, everybody can register and post his own thoughts here. Every registered user automatically is granted the own blog space and an opportunity to

Different potential user groups and even users within the same group can have different opinions on the product features. The only way to see the high-level picture is to question many users and to gather some statistics on the user preferences. If the user opinions are gathered with the help of Kano questionnaires, the answers can be analyzed in a simple table.

One of the simplest ways of dividing the product features into must-haves, linear, exciters and even wrong features is to gather the potential customer's opinion with the help of the Kano questionnaires ( PDF ). Kano questionnaires include two questions for the every feature or group of features: the functional question "How do you feel if this feature is present?" and dysfunctional question "How do you feel if this feature is NOT present?"

According to the Standish group research on average 45% of a software features are never used and only 20% of features are used always or often. It means that on average you could develop two times simpler product and sell it for the same price. Potentially gains can be even bigger, for the enterprise scale systems two times simpler product often means four times shorter schedules and ten times simpler integration and testing.

There is no other way to discover what features would be actually used, than to ask the real or at least potential customers, preferably after letting them to try some features live. One of the tools for aiding the feature categorization is the Kano model of customer satisfaction.