An Improved Method for Selection of COTS Components Based on Quality Requirements

Abstract

Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products have received a lot of attention in the last decade. Selection of Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) software packages is currently a fundamental task in software engineering. Selection of inappropriate COTS may lead to irreplaceable loss of effort, time and much more. Most appropriate COTS selection is complicated because of a number of factors, the most important being the user quality requirements. Therefore, selection can be ameliorated by transforming user quality requirements into requirements expressed in terms of the quality model attributes. Selection is basically composed of two main processes, namely: searching of candidate COTS from the marketplace based on the stakeholders’ requirements and their evaluation with respect to the requirements. But most of the different existing methods for COTS selection focus their efforts on evaluation, letting aside the problem of relating the quality requirements of COTS while searching in the marketplace. Searching candidate COTS is not an easy task, having to cope with some challenging marketplace characteristics related to its widespread, evolvable and growing nature; and the lack of available and well-suited information to obtain a quality-assured search. Mapping of the system requirements into quality requirements is very important. In this thesis work, the use of quality model in selection of COTS components is presented using the ISO/IEC 9126 quality standard using the hierarchical feature graph. A new method has been proposed that takes care of quality requirements of the stakeholders and an after evaluation mismatch handling.