Recent work in opening up distributed object systems to make them suitable for applications needing quality of service control has had the side effect of increasing the complexity in setting up, configuring, and initializing such applications. Configuration of distributed applications is more complicated than that of non-distributed applications, simply because of the heterogeneous and distributed nature of the application's components. CORBA and other distributed object middleware simplifies the configuration of distributed object applications, but hides much of the information and control necessary to achieve quality of service (QoS).This paper describes the techniques and tools that we have developed within our Quality Objects (QuO) framework for simplifying the configuration of distributed applications with QoS attributes. We describe a QuO configuration language, as well as the specific configuration needs of particular QoS properties - real-time, security, and dependability - and the support we provide for them.