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Software Quality Attributes

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Abstract

Much of a software architect’s life is spent designing software systems to meet a set of quality attribute requirements. General software quality attributes include scalability, security, performance and reliability. These are often informally called an application’s “-ilities” (though of course some, like performance, don’t quite fit this lexical specification).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ward Cunningham at his finest!

  2. 2.

    From http://www.hyperdictionary.com

  3. 3.

    Adding faster CPUs is never a bad idea either. This is especially true if an application has components or calculations that are inherently single-threaded.

  4. 4.

    The full context for these figures is described in: I.Gorton, A Liu, Performance Evaluation of Alternative Component Architectures for Enterprise JavaBean Applications, in IEEE Internet Computing, vol.7, no. 3, pages 18-23, 2003. Bear in mind, these results are a snapshot in time and are meant for illustrative purposes. Absolutely no conclusions about the performance of the current versions of these technologies can or should be drawn.

  5. 5.

    A good overview of data intensive computing issues and some interesting approaches is the Special Edition of IEEE Computer from April 2008 – http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/magazines/computer#3

  6. 6.

    http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html

  7. 7.

    “There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult”. C.A.R. Hoare.

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Correspondence to Ian Gorton .

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Gorton, I. (2011). Software Quality Attributes. In: Essential Software Architecture. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19176-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19176-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19175-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19176-3

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