What is Software Quality Attributes

Today’s handheld devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and PDA-based smartphones, are burgeoning with ever increasing multimedia capabilities. Such capabilities include traditional services like streaming audio and video as well as newer services like context-based and situational aware computing. A sophisticated mixture of middleware, network services, and device-based software provides such capabilities. The objective of this chapter is to discuss specific quality attributes with respect to device-side software architectures providing these multimedia capabilities. This chapter focuses specifically on device-side client architectures, rather than network or middleware architectures. Specific domain requirements and quality attributes are first derived through a synthesis of current research and industry trends, and subsequently analyzed. The analysis reveals some qualitative results that seem unintuitive at first glance, but that become more understandable when provided with rationale relative to the handheld domain context.