Quality attributes and aspects of a medical product family

The author describes experiences with quality attributes and aspects in the development of a medical imaging product family. Quality attributes play a role in the problem space, whereas aspects play a role in the solution space. The usage of quality attributes and aspects introduces multiple views, dealing with separate concerns. For example, one can view a system from a safety or portability point of view, or one can focus on the initialisation or error handling aspects of components. Quality attributes and aspects are used to add structure to the various phases of the development process. They form a supporting means for achieving completeness, i.e. have all relevant concerns been taken into account? In a product family context where the family members are constructed from a component based platform, it is especially useful to achieve aspect-completeness of components, allowing system composition without worrying about individual aspects such as initialisation.