From the context I assumed these are the things I knew as “non-functional requirements”. Basically, random stuff which doesn’t have specific associated use cases. Depending on the project, they might specify environment, setup and deployment, throughput and latency, system requirements, security, reliability, compliance, etc.

In systems design quality attributes are non-functional requirements that are used for the evaluation of the system itself rather than the intended behavior of the feature being implemented. E.g. system extensibility, scalability are quality attributes.

Right? That seems to be the thing this article is advocating and I have no idea what they are.