from PART III - Architectural Design
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Software quality attributes (Bass, Clements, and Kazman 2003) refer to the nonfunctional requirements of software, which can have a profound effect on the quality of a software product. Many of these attributes can be addressed and evaluated at the time the software architecture is developed. Software quality attributes include maintainability, modifiability, testability, traceability, scalability, reusability, performance, availability, and security. An introduction to software quality attributes is given in Section 4.6. This section describes each of these attributes and discusses how they are supported by the COMET design method.
Some software quality attributes are also system quality attributes because they need both the hardware and software to achieve high quality. Examples of these quality attributes are performance, availability, and security. Other software quality attributes are purely software in nature because they rely entirely on the quality of the software. Examples of these quality attributes are maintainability, modifiability, testability, and traceability.
MAINTAINABILITY
Maintainability is the extent to which software is capable of being changed after deployment. Software may need to be modified for the following reasons:
Fix remaining errors. These are errors that were not detected during testing of the software prior to deployment.
Address performance issues. Performance problems may not become apparent until after the software application has been deployed and is operational in the field.
Changes in software requirements. The biggest reason for software change is changes in software requirements.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.