Developing the right features : the role and impact of customer and product data in software product development

Software product development companies are increasingly striving to become data-driven. The access to customer feedback and product data has been, with products increasingly becoming connected to the Internet, demonetized. Systematically collecting the feedback and efficiently using it in product development, however, are challenges that large-scale software development companies face today when being faced by large amounts of available data. In this thesis, we explore the collection, use and impact of customer feedback on software product development. We base our work on a 2-year longitudinal multiple-case study research with case companies in the software-intensive domain, and complement it with a systematic review of the literature. In our work, we identify and confirm that large-software companies today collect vast amounts of feedback data, however, struggle to effectively use it. And due to this situation, there is a risk of prioritizing the development of features that may not deliver value to customers. Our contribution to this problem is threefold. First, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of activities and techniques used to collect customer feedback and product data in software product development. Next, we show that the impact of customer feedback evolves over time, but due to the lack of sharing of the collected data, companies do not fully benefit from this feedback. Finally, we provide an improvement framework for practitioners and researchers to use the collected feedback data in order to differentiate between different feature types and to model feature value during the lifecycle. With our contributions, we aim to bring software companies one step closer to data-driven decision making in software product development