The industrial usability of quality function deployment: a literature review and synthesis on a meta-level

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a development methodology that has been in industrial use for about 30 years. For industry professionals, it is thus important to know what type of outcomes they can expect from using QFD, but also how to behave according to best practice. In this paper, the research results from nine studies of the industrial usability of the QFD methodology have been reviewed, analysed and synthesised on a meta-level. In this meta-analysis, a new framework for the assessment of methodologies has been developed, and the QFD methodology as such has also been used as a research instrument. The results show that the previously often-cited most important outcome, ‘shorter time-to-market’, has no scientific support at all. The good news is that the outcomes ‘better products’ and ‘improved information dissemination and retrieval’ have strong support.