This week I participated in the Twentieth International Conference of the Israel Society for Quality in Tel-Aviv, giving a talk about “Software Quality Attributes”.

Title: Software Quality Attributes

Abstract: 

The quality of software systems may be expressed as a collection of Software Quality Attributes. When the system requirements are defined, it is essential also to define what is expected regarding these quality attributes, since these expectations will guide the planning of the system architecture and design.

Software quality attributes may be classified into two main categories: static and dynamic. Static quality attributes are the ones that reflect the system’s structure and organization. Examples of static attributes are coupling, cohesion, complexity, maintainability and extensibility. Dynamic attributes are the ones that reflect the behavior of the system during its execution. Examples of dynamic attributes are memory usage, latency, throughput, scalability, robustness and fault-tolerance.

Following the definitions of expectations regarding the quality attributes, it is essential to devise ways to measure them and verify that the implemented system satisfies the requirements. Some static attributes may be measured through static code analysis tools, while others require effective design and code reviews. The measuring and verification of dynamic attributes requires the usage of special non-functional testing tools such as profilers and simulators.

In this talk I will discuss the main Software Quality attributes, both static and dynamic, examples of requirements, and practical guidelines on how to measure and verify these attributes.

Bio: Hayim Makabee was born in Rio de Janeiro. He immigrated to Israel in 1992 and completed his M.Sc. studies on Computer Sciences at the Technion. Since then he worked for several hi-tech companies, including also some start-ups. Currently he is a Research Engineer at Yahoo! Labs Haifa. He is also a co-founder of the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) in Israel. Hayim is the author of a book about Object-Oriented Programming and has published papers in the fields of Software Engineering, Distributed Systems and Genetic Algorithms. Hayim’s current research interests are Data Mining and Recommender Systems.

These are the original slides of Hayim’s presentation:

Here is the video of the talk (in Hebrew):

This session was organized with the cooperation of ILTAM.

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