Quality Factor
- Quality Factor (a.k.a., Quality Attribute, Quality Characteristic, “ility”)
- an attribute, characteristic, or property of a
work product
or process that characterizes an important aspect of its overall quality
As illustrated in the preceding figure, Quality Factor is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:
Usage-Oriented Quality Factor:
The typical responsibilities of a Quality Factor are to:
- Enable a stakeholder to judge some aspect of the quality of a work product or process.
- Provide a foundation for defining
quality requirements.
- Provide a foundation for evaluating the quality of an architecture.
The typical stakeholders of a quality factor are:
- Producers:
- Evaluator:
- Approvers:
- Maintainers:
- Users:
- Quality Team,
which documents the quality factors in the quality plan.
- Requirements Team,
which uses the quality factors to analyze quality requirements and specify them in the
system requirements specification.
- Architecture Team,
which creates architecture that exhibit the required levels of the relevant quality factors.
- The quality factors drive the quality goals, which drive
the quality requirements, which drive the quality
architectural mechanisms, which drive the quality tests.
