Product quality framework: a vehicle for focusing on product quality goals

Quality focus is generally on process quality, the avoidance and elimination of defects. This is the most relevant for manufacturing processes. In engineering design, there is as much emphasis also on product quality aspects, such as availability, performance, usability, maintainability etc. Current systems and software engineering practice generally puts the burden of optimizing these attributes solely on the knowledge, intuition and ability of architects and designers.The product quality framework provides a systematic approach that includes techniques for specifying, optimizing, analyzing and measuring these attributes. The framework also puts explicit emphasis on tradeoffs between attributes, providing a direct relationship between design and customer concerns. This paper describes the framework and its use as a vehicle for the engineering of high availability systems.