Abstract
The use of distributed component based environments and architectures in the software development lifecycle has increased significantly over recent years particularly with the adoption of service orientation in the form of Service-Oriented Architectures and Web Services. As more applications are based on the component paradigm, Quality of Service (QoS) issues have grown to become imperative since it is essential to achieve the desired QoS on resources assembled dynamically from enterprise, service provider, and customer systems. In this work some of the many of aspects of QoS for component based development are investigated and the metrics and measurement approaches that can be used are considered. Although they are generic it is relatively straightforward to drill down from a generic quality attributes, such as performance or reliability, until measurable and controllable quality attributes are identified.