4.5 Other System Quality Attributes

We have discussed the quality attributes in a general fashion. A number of other attributes can be found in the attribute taxonomies in the research literature and in standard software engineering textbooks, and we have captured many of these in our scenarios. For example, scalability is often an important attribute, but in our discussion here scalability is captured by modifying system capacity-the number of users supported, for example. Portability is captured as a platform modification.

If some quality attribute-say interoperability-is important to your organization, it is reasonable to create your own general scenario for it. This simply involves filling out the six parts of the scenario generation framework: source, stimulus, environment, artifact, response, and response measure. For interoperability, a stimulus might be a request to interoperate with another system, a response might be a new interface or set of interfaces for the interoperation, and a response measure might be the difficulty in terms of time, the number of interfaces to be modified, and so forth.