ITA - Information Technology Architecture Architectural Quality Attributes Questions and Answers

Question 1

An e-commerce platform for a major sporting event is preparing for a ticket sale that is expected to cause a massive, short-term surge in user traffic for a few hours.
Which quality attribute BEST describes the system's ability to automatically provision resources to handle this peak load and then de-provision them afterwards to minimize costs?

Accepted Answer

Elasticity

Answer

Availability

Answer

Scalability

Answer

Fault Tolerance

Question 2

An IT architect is explaining system quality attributes to a project stakeholder. Which statement best distinguishes 'Availability' from 'Reliability'?

Accepted Answer

Availability is the probability that a system is operational at any given moment, while Reliability is the probability it will operate correctly without failure over a specified duration. [15, 17]

Answer

Availability is a measure of system uptime, while Reliability is a measure of how quickly the system can be repaired.

Answer

Reliability focuses on preventing all failures, whereas Availability is only concerned with network accessibility.

Answer

Reliability is measured in 'nines' (e.g., 99.99%), while Availability is measured by Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).

Question 3

An enterprise is struggling with a legacy monolithic application where fixing bugs or adding new features has become excessively slow and expensive, often introducing new defects. This operational difficulty points to a significant degradation of which architectural quality attribute?

Accepted Answer

Maintainability

Answer

Performance

Answer

Portability

Answer

Security

Question 4

To meet stringent data protection regulations, an architect designs a system to perform multiple layers of data encryption and cryptographic signing for every transaction. This design choice is most likely to create a negative trade-off with which other critical quality attribute?

Accepted Answer

Performance

Answer

Reliability

Answer

Availability

Answer

Modularity

Question 5

An organization is building a new solution that must integrate and exchange data with several existing systems from different vendors, including a cloud-based CRM and an on-premise ERP. The ability of these disparate systems to successfully exchange and make use of information is defined by which quality attribute?

Accepted Answer

Interoperability

Answer

Reusability

Answer

Portability

Answer

Modifiability

Question 6

During the design of a complex system, the lead architect insists that every major component must be designed in a way that allows it to be verified independently through automated scripts and that it exposes diagnostic endpoints. This practice directly enhances which quality attribute?

Accepted Answer

Testability

Answer

Security

Answer

Scalability

Answer

Usability