Role of Software Product Customer in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Trend: Empirical Observations on Software Quality Construction Frank Philip Seth, Ossi Taipale and Kari Smolander Department of Software Engineering and Information Management Lappeenranta University of Technology Lappeenranta, Finland. frank.seth | ossi.taipale | kari.smolander@lut.fi Abstract - The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, allows employ- ees to bring personal devices of their choice into the work environment. Since quality goals vary between employees and the organization where they work, it is difficult for software developers to deliver quality prod- uct that will satisfy both parties at the same time. This study presents seven findings: First, visible features of the software and functional re- quirements supersede nonfunctional (quality) characteristics when deal- ing with customer requirements; second, quality depends more on the market decision than standards’ requirements; third, companies focus on ‘just enough quality’ and not on ‘high quality’ products; fourth, software quality has a dimension of cost; fifth, organizations try to alle- viate threats brought by employees’ device or software through policies (quality aspect of policy) ; sixth, simplicity and attractiveness of devic- es sell poor quality software; and seventh, the number of product fea- tures does not affect the sense of quality, but quality characteristics do. These findings identify the role of software customers in deciding about the quality of products and the impact in the BYOD. Software is devel- oped according to end-user requirements, and the end-user has the free- dom to choose devices, applications software, and place to use the de- vices including working environment, where the software may cause risk to the company. Keywords: Consumerization, BYOD, Bring Your Own Device, software qual- ity construction, functional requirements, nonfunctional requirements, attrac- tiveness, software quality, quality characteristics. 1. Introduction Software quality construction is a complex sociotechnical process (Hovenden et al. 1996) influenced by technical and nontechnical stakeholders, processes, organization- al systems and tools (Park et al. 2012; Seth et al. 2014a; Seth et al. 2014b). It is diffi- cult to define quality, there is no one ultimate definition of quality agreed upon all stakeholders (Garvin 1984; Seth et al. 2012; Smolander 2002), and either there is no adfa, p. 1, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011