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Explores the issue of software development process improvement. Total quality management (TQM) tools have been studied as possible means to improve the quality of the software that is becoming an important part of organizational processes. The TQM philosophy that has been so successfully applied in manufacturing holds that quality must be built into the production process and not inspected into the product. Given the complexity of modern software applications, the ability to move away from using testing and inspection as quality control methods is very attractive. Examines the current literature on software development process improvement. Particular attention is paid to how customer requirements are gathered and translated into system requirements. Finds that current methods for requirements definition do not provide a formal means to deploy the “voice of the customer” into system specifications. Further, finds after a review, that current software quality function deployment (QFD) methods suffer from a number of shortcomings. Proposes a four‐stage model for performing software‐oriented QFD to address these significant problems.