Introduction
Software quality attributes are characteristics that define and measure the overall quality of a software system. These attributes play a crucial role in determining how well a software product meets its intended purpose and satisfies user requirements. They are essential considerations in software architecture and design, influencing the system’s performance, reliability, and user satisfaction.
Understanding and prioritizing these attributes is crucial for developers, architects, and stakeholders to create high-quality software that meets user needs and business objectives. The following sections delve deeper into specific architectural characteristics and metrics used to evaluate these quality attributes.
Architectural Characteristics
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Most common Architectural Characteristics
- 🚀 Scalability - Determines the highest workloads under which the system will still function effectively.
- 🔄 Availability - Defines the probability that a user can access the system at any given time.
- 🧩 Extensibility - Assesses the ease of extending a system and the effort required to do so.
- 🔁 ConsistencyEnsures data and behavior remains uniform and coherent across the system.
- 💪 Resiliency - Measures a system’s ability to handle both malicious and unintentional errors and recover from them.
- 👥 Usability - Addresses how easy or difficult it is to use the product.
- 🔍 Observability - The capability to monitor and understand a system’s internal state, performance, and behavior through data collection, logging, and analysis.
- 🔒 Security - Ensures that all data and system integrity within or part of the system is protected from malware attacks, unauthorized access, and other security threats.
- ⏳ Durability - The ability of software to be maintained and continue meeting users’ needs over an extended period.
- 🔄 Agility - Measures how quickly and easily an agile team can respond to changes, from maintainability to deployability.
Key Quality Attributes and Metrics
🚀 Performance
Definition: The time it takes to complete a piece of work and the number of workload instances the system can handle in a set time.