Quality attributes
Quality attributes are the different aspects of a product that go beyond functionality. When you're thinking about a testing strategy for a large product, you're not just looking at functionality—you’re thinking about security, performance, and other aspects that might be important. In the same way, we need to look at what quality attributes matter not only for the product but also for different people, like ops, developers, and product owners. By identifying these attributes, we can spot potential threats to quality in different places.
Walter Shewhart worked to improve the quality of telephones. He wrote that “every conceptual “something” is really a group of conceptions in more elementary form. The minimum number of conceptions required to define an object may be called the qualities thereof”. “In this sense a thing has qualities not a quality”. The qualities that Shewhart wrote about are now called quality attributes, so quality attributes can be defined as "the minimum number of conceptions required to define an object".
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