International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 4, Issue 1, January 2014 1 ISSN 2250-3153 www.ijsrp.org A Research Study on Software Quality Attributes Dr.A.Chandrasekar * , Mrs.SudhaRajesh ** , Mr.P.Rajesh *** * Professor, CSE Department, St.Joseph’s College of Engineering ** Asst. Prof, CSE Dept., SRR Engineering College *** Asst. Prof, IT Dept, M.S.A.J College of Engineering Abstract- Software quality is becoming an important part in software design, helping the designer to handle the complexity of large systems. While designing, the architect should analyze the system requirements before committing the resources to it. The analyzing process helps us to ensure the high quality of architecture design. For the past decade, there were many analyzing methods are used, which in turn to analyze only the views of single stakeholder. By doing so, there are many limitations that lead to critical situation in the development process. They elaborated this situation to excessive amount of time to perform the complete analysis. The scope of finding the key architectural decision is very difficult. Intend of these types of analysis gives the detailed information only after the designing phase, which makes the software unusable and not satisfied by the end-users. Generally, unusable software is useless. Customers and users won’t accept un¬usable software, even if it provides the required features with the required operations. This paper gives the survey on software quality attributes. It is also used to manage the conflicts in views by analyzing it, with finest software quality attributes such as Performance, Dependability and Safety concerns. It represents one or more structural aspects, which illustrate how the architecture addresses the concerns such as requirements, objective, intention of stakeholders for the architecture design. This paper also gives the stakeholder’s views with preeminent quality attributes, which meets the non functional requirements (such as reliability, usability, maintainability and portability). Thus by having the centric-view of stakeholders with superlative software quality attributes, guarantees an optimum quality for software architecture design. Index Terms- Quality Attributes I. INTRODUCTION here are many different definitions of quality. For some it is the "capability of a software product to conform to requirements." (ISO/IEC 9001) while for others it can be synonymous with "customer value" (Highsmith, 2002) or even defect level. The first definition of quality history remembers is from Shewhart in the beginning of 20th century: There are two common aspects of quality: one of them has to do with the consideration of the quality of a thing as an objective reality independent of the existence of man. The other has to do with what we think, feel or sense as a result of the objective reality. In the context of software engineering , software quality refers to some relations but distinct notions that exist wherever quality is defined in a business context: Software functional quality reflects how well it complies with or conforms to a given design, based on functional requirements or specifications. That attribute can also be described as the fitness for purpose of a piece of software. Software structural quality refers to how it meets non- functional requirements that support the delivery of the functional requirements, such as robustness or maintainability, the degree to which the software was produced correctly. Quality Attributes Software quality is defined as the degree to which software possesses a desired combination of attributes. [1]The quality requirements to build the software architecture have to fulfill the stakeholders. They are commonly divided in two main groups based on the quality they are requesting, i.e., development and operational qualities. A development quality requirement is a requirement that is of importance for the developers work, e.g., maintainability, understandability, and flexibility. Operational quality requirements are requirements that make the system better from the user’s point of view, e.g. performance and usability. Depending on the domain and priorities of the users and developers, quality requirements can become both development and operational, such as performance in a real-time system. A quality attribute is the property of a software system. A quality requirement is a requirement that is placed on a software system by a stakeholder; a quality attribute is what the system actually presents once it has been implemented. During the development of the architecture it is therefore important to validate that the architecture has the required quality attributes, this is usually done using one or more architecture evaluations. Quality Attributes in Focus The focuses are on the following quality attributes: performance, maintainability, testability, and portability. The IEEE standard 610.12-1990 [2] defines the four quality attributes as: Maintainability: This is defined as: ―The ease with which a software system or component can be modified to correct faults, improve performance or other attributes, or adapt to a changed environment.‖ Maintainability is a multifaceted quality requirement. It incorporates aspects such as readability and understandability of the source code. Maintainability is also concerned with testability to some extent, as the system has to be re-validated during the maintenance. Performance: Performance is defined as: T