Authors:
Alejandra Cechich
1
and
Mario Piattini
2
Affiliations:
1
Universidad del Comahue, Argentina
;
2
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Spain
Keyword(s):
Component-Based System Assessment, COTS components, Software Quality.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Methodologies, Processes and Platforms
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Requirements Analysis And Management
;
Software Engineering
;
Systems Engineering
Abstract:
COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) components can be incorporated into other systems to help software developers to produce a new system, so that both artefacts – components and the system – form a single functional entity. In that way, developing software becomes a matter of balancing required and offered functionality between the parties. But required functionality is highly dependent on component’s users, i.e. stakeholders of a COTS component selection process. Inputs to this process include discussions with composers, reuse architects, business process coordinators, and so forth. In this paper, we present an approach for balancing stakeholder’s preferences, which can be used in the process of measuring functional suitability of COTS candidates. We describe and illustrate the use of our proposal to weight requirements of components and determine suitable COTS candidates for given software.