Quality Attributes Pillar

For quality attributes, it appears that we worry about incorporating certain quality attributes into our solutions but do not seem very concerned with how they will be monitored. In general, we don’t seem to care about how solutions will be managed, maintained, and will sunset at end of life. This is especially interesting as 20 percent of the cost of a solution occurs during design and delivery and 80 percent is spent in maintenance over the life of the solution.

Quality Attributes Capabilities

Balancing and Optimizing Quality Attributes

Demonstrated management/mitigation of specific issues relative to balancing and optimizing in systems development projects. Application of basic strategies and tactics necessary to provide optimal performance, user experience and return on investment from IT projects.

Manageability, Maintainability, Supportability, Extensibility, and Flexibility

Demonstrated management/mitigation of issues relative to manageability, maintainability, supportability, extensibility, and flexibility and enable the student to understand each of these quality attributes. Demonstrated competence in implementation techniques.

Monitoring and Management

Demonstrated understanding of specific quality management imperatives, techniques and tools.  Demonstrated proficiency in problem analysis, capacity planning, Service Level Agreement (SLA) creation and management and issue response techniques.

Performance, Reliability, Availability, and Scalability

Demonstrated management/mitigation of issues relating to performance, reliability, availability, and scalability. Demonstrated understanding of these quality attributes such as portability and efficiency and competence in implementation techniques.

Security

Demonstrated understanding of security, privacy, authenticity, access privileges, information protection and disaster recovery, asset management techniques, threat modeling and recovery, and related issues. Demonstrated competence in basic implementation techniques.

Usability, Localization, Accessibility, Personalization/Customizability

Demonstrated understanding of usability and human factors fundamentals. Ability to describe related internationalization strategies and current issues. Demonstrated competence in implementation techniques.

Compliance

Regulatory compliance across quality attributes.

Packaging, Delivery, Post deployment

Demonstrated understanding of the expectations, process and management of IT products following the completion of development and prior to “normal” day-to-day operating conditions. Techniques used and preferred for data conversion management, deployment strategies, documentation and training, user acceptance testing, and installation and maintenance planning. Demonstrated competence in highest priority management techniques.