Practice Test Geeks(CMA) Certified Master Architect Practice Test
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Quality Attribute Analysis Flashcards

7 cards from real CMA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Quality Attribute Analysis flashcards as text

  1. Which quality attribute is MOST concerned with the effort required to diagnose and fix defects in a deployed system?

    Answer: Maintainability

    Maintainability encompasses the ease of diagnosing problems and making corrections after a system is deployed.

  2. In ATAM, after presenting the architecture and collecting scenarios, the evaluation team looks for 'risks.' What do architectural risks represent?

    Answer: Potentially problematic architectural decisions that may violate quality requirements

    In ATAM, risks are architectural decisions that could fail to meet one or more quality attribute requirements under certain conditions.

  3. Which tactic for the security quality attribute focuses on recording system events to support post-incident investigation?

    Answer: Audit trail

    An audit trail records system events in a tamper-resistant log, enabling forensic analysis and accountability after a security incident.

  4. A system uses a load balancer to distribute requests across ten servers. Beyond performance, which quality attribute does this architecture MOST directly support?

    Answer: Availability

    Load balancing across multiple servers means that if one server fails, others continue handling requests, improving overall availability.

  5. Which quality attribute is addressed when an architect designs a system so that its internal operations can be monitored and its state can be inferred from outputs?

    Answer: Observability

    Observability is the degree to which a system's internal states can be inferred from its external outputs, logs, metrics, and traces.

  6. An architect is evaluating two design options: Option A achieves high security but adds 150ms latency; Option B achieves <50ms latency but weakens encryption. This exemplifies which concept in quality attribute analysis?

    Answer: Tradeoff point

    A tradeoff point is an architectural decision where improving one quality attribute (security) negatively impacts another (performance).

  7. Which quality attribute scenario 'environment' descriptor distinguishes how a system should behave during an overload condition versus normal operation?

    Answer: System mode

    The environment component of a scenario specifies the system's operational mode — such as normal, overload, or degraded — when the stimulus occurs.