By name: quality-attributes description: Eight quality attributes for software evaluation: supportability, extendability, maintainability, testability, performance, safety, security, observability. Use when conducting design reviews or code reviews to evaluate all quality dimensions. allowed-tools: Glob, Grep, Read, WebFetch, WebSearch compatibility: claude-code metadata: version: 1.0.0 category: domains tags: [quality, review, architecture, design]
Quality Attributes Skill
Eight quality attributes for evaluating software design and implementation.
The 8 Quality Attributes
1. Supportability
Definition: How easy is it to diagnose and fix issues?
Key aspects:
- Adequate logging at critical paths
- Clear, actionable error messages
- Debugging information available
- Operational troubleshooting considered
2. Extendability
Definition: How easy is it to add new features?
Key aspects:
- Modular design
- Appropriate abstractions
- Extension points identified
- Future requirements anticipated
3. Maintainability
Definition: How easy is it to understand and modify the code?
Key aspects:
- Code clarity and naming
- Minimal complexity
- Follows project conventions
- Self-documenting approach
4. Testability
Definition: How easy is it to test the system?
Key aspects:
- Unit test strategy defined; components testable in isolation
- Integration tests written (not just planned) for component boundaries
- Integration tests tagged to run separately from unit tests
- Edge cases covered; no flaky tests
- When a coverage target can be extracted from repo policy, CI, or review context, expect
>= 80%coverage unless the project defines a stricter rule
5. Performance
Definition: Does the system meet performance requirements?
Key aspects:
- No obvious bottlenecks
- Resource usage reasonable
- Algorithms appropriate for scale
- Profiling and optimization strategy
6. Safety
Definition: Does the system handle errors and edge cases gracefully?
Key aspects:
- Comprehensive error handling
- Edge cases handled
- Resource management (RAII, defer, etc.)
- Thread safety (if applicable)
- No undefined behavior
7. Security
Definition: Is the system protected against vulnerabilities?
Key aspects:
- Input validation and sanitization
- No injection vulnerabilities (SQL, command, XSS)
- Secrets not hardcoded
- Authentication/authorization appropriate
- Dependencies from trusted sources
8. Observability
Definition: Can we understand system behavior in production?
Key aspects:
- Key operations logged
- Metrics available
- Traceable across boundaries
- Performance can be monitored
Usage
Design Review
Evaluate proposed design against all 8 attributes before implementation.
Code Review
Verify implementation meets quality standards for all 8 attributes after implementation. After the 8-attribute scan, also run both mandatory enumeration passes (always required, not part of the attribute scan):
- Test Quality Pass — per-test enumeration: assertion specificity, name/assertion alignment, falsifiability, negative coverage
- Cross-Site Consistency Pass — audit all invocation sites for every changed contract: function signatures, build commands, interfaces, config values
See references/review-checklist.md for the full procedure for both passes.
References (checklist lookup — explicitly read when doing reviews)
references/review-checklist.md— full design and code review checklists (pass this path to reviewer agent)