Best Practices for managing the fuzzy front-end of software development (SD): Insights from a systematic review of new product development (NPD) literature
Although they have followed independent paths of development, the two fields of software development (SD) and new product development (NPD) face common problems (Buyukozkan and Feyzioglu, 2004; Shane and Ulrich, 2004) and share many similarities (Nambisan and Wilemon, 2000). The research findings in the NPD domain are therefore relevant to SD (Nambisan and Wilemon, 2000). In this article we conduct a systematic literature review to identify the empirically validated best practices in the fuzzy front end (FFE) phase of NPD. The findings presented in this article will be useful as any improvement in the upstream front end phase of SD can result in the most positive impact on downstream SD activities (Hannola, Oinonen and Nikula, 2011)
