Skip to content

References: Quality Attributes

Curated sources for deeper study of quality attributes — their definitions, taxonomy, conflicts, prioritization, and translation into measurable stimulus-response requirements.

Books

  • Bass, Len, Paul Clements, and Rick Kazman. (2021). Software Architecture in Practice (4th ed.). Addison-Wesley. Provides the SEI's authoritative treatment of all eight canonical ATAM quality attributes, their sub-attributes, stimulus-response models, and the tactics used to achieve each — the primary reference for this chapter's definitions.

  • Barbacci, Mario, et al. (1995). Quality Attributes. CMU/SEI-95-TR-021. Software Engineering Institute. The original SEI technical report that established the quality attribute vocabulary used in ATAM, providing the theoretical foundation for the definitions and taxonomy presented in this chapter.

  • ISO/IEC. (2011). Systems and Software Engineering — Systems and Software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE): System and Software Quality Models. ISO/IEC 25010. The international standard defining the quality model taxonomy referenced in this chapter, organizing quality attributes into the eight top-level characteristics that ATAM evaluates.

  • Nygard, Michael T. (2018). Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (2nd ed.). Pragmatic Bookshelf. Provides practical, production-tested coverage of availability, reliability, and performance quality attributes and the patterns that achieve them, complementing the theoretical definitions in this chapter.

Articles and Papers

  • Chung, Lawrence, et al. (2012). Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering. Springer. Academic treatment of non-functional requirements (quality attribute requirements) including their classification, conflict analysis, and operationalization — directly supporting this chapter's distinction between functional and quality attribute requirements.

  • Barbacci, Mario, et al. (2003). "Quality Attribute Workshops (QAWs)." CMU/SEI-2003-TR-016. Software Engineering Institute. The SEI technical report on the Quality Attribute Workshop technique for eliciting quality attribute requirements from stakeholders, directly supporting this chapter's introduction of the QAW method.

Online Resources

  • Software Quality Attributes — Wikipedia. Comprehensive overview of software quality, quality models, and the taxonomy of quality attributes, providing a well-maintained reference for the definitions introduced in this chapter.

  • ISO/IEC 25010 Quality Model Overview — ISO 25000 Portal. Accessible summary of the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model referenced in this chapter, showing how the standard organizes quality into eight top-level characteristics and their sub-characteristics.

  • QAW Facilitation Guide — Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. SEI guide to facilitating Quality Attribute Workshops, the recommended preparation technique for ATAM Phase 1 scenario elicitation described at the end of this chapter.

  • The CAP Theorem — Wikipedia. Reference for the CAP theorem underlying the scalability-versus-consistency quality attribute conflict described in this chapter's conflict table, providing the formal theoretical basis for one of the most important distributed systems tradeoffs.

Videos

  • "Quality Attributes in Software Architecture." SEI Podcast Series. Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. https://resources.sei.cmu.edu. SEI educational content on quality attributes, their stimulus-response model, and how they drive architectural decision-making — authoritative complement to this chapter's definitions and taxonomy.