Quality Attribute Scenarios were popularized by the Software Engineering Institute in the early 2000’s, in the book, Evaluating Software Architectures by Rick Kazman, Paul Clements, and Mark Klein. A quality attribute scenario associates a stimulus, and a set of environmental conditions with an expected outcome of the system whose architecture is being evaluated. Quality Attribute Scenarios are commonly organized in a Quality Attribute tree.
Contexts and Challenges are topics written about in other pages in this blog:
- http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/architecture-in-a-nutshell/
- http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/multi-context-systems/
- http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/the-significance-of-context/
Over the past several months, I have observed several product managers, architects and engineers misapply quality attributes, quality attribute scenarios, contexts and challenges. While these concepts are closely related (even to the point of some overlap), the nuances driving their distinctions are important. In http://charliealfred.wordpress.com/quality-attributes-contexts-and-challenges/, I will try to clarify the relationship between these two useful sets of concepts.
