Using an Updating Urn-Scheme for Prioritizing Quality Requirements in the Early Stage of Collaboration Design

The effective prioritization of quality requirements (QR) in collaborative product development is studied. The requirements for a quality product are often obtained by questioning and interviewing targeted customers. However, the targeted customers often are not able to clearly articulate and be specific on what constitute a quality product. Even for those clearly specified requirements, they may not be able to determine the relative importance. Moreover, concerns of the developer’s organization and the society, such as the company goals and priorities as well as environmental regulations, may not get necessary attention by customers. Hence, efforts to prioritize QR’s across all stakeholders in developing a quality product are necessary. Prior research has focused on developing a process of prioritizing QR’s. Although our proposed urn-scheme method in prioritizing QR’s may be considered yet another voting mechanism, it differs in two major directions. Firstly, the proposed method explicitly incorporates social dynamic factors such as interpersonal trust and trustworthiness into the voting process. These latent factors are quantified and measured allowing us to visualize their effects on individual stakeholder’s prioritization list. Secondly, with the most trusted stakeholders’ prioritization lists amplified and the least trusted stakeholders’ opinions down weighed, the final combined prioritization list, weighing over all individual lists, is the result of the direct voting and social dynamics, all quantified, and thus, relative importance of quality requirements can be derived. The most important requirements are typically viewed by most stakeholders as important and particularly so by the most trusted stakeholders. A discussion on possible voting results is given. Extension of the proposed method to cover issues such as power influence and conflicts as well as degree of consensus is also provided.