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by Michael Ochs, Dietmar Pfahl, Gunther Chrobok-Diening, and Beate Nothhelfer-Kolb
"Defining
a systematic and repeatable COTS acquisition process (CAP)"
The use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products in state-of-the-practice software development has shown a substantial increase during the last few years. The benefits of COTS usage are clear: reduced development cost and shorter time-to-market.
However, using COTS software in development activities also raises risks such as using software that does not sufficiently satisfy the requirements regarding, e.g., reliability, fault tolerance, functionality. Thus, a sound method that helps to decide which COTS software will be used in a specific development context has become mandatory.
This paper introduces and describes a well-defined, systematic, and repeatable COTS acquisition process (CAP) and experience of using a tailored version of the process in a Siemens Business Unit. This includes the definition of the process, a brief description of the activities, and the description of the heuristics for effectiveness and efficiency integrated with the process.
Moreover, we present data on cost, benefit, and quality aspects originating from an industrial case study in which the process was applied.
From this data collected during the pilot project, conclusions are drawn on the process performance and whether it is worthwhile to apply the CAP.
The use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products in state-of-the-practice software development has shown a substantial increase during the last few years.
The benefits of COTS usage are clear: reduced development cost and shorter time-to-market make COTS software an economical choice [13]. Moreover, there are tendencies that many software companies more and more see themselves not as software/system developers but integrators.
However, using COTS software in development activities also raises risks, uncertainties and problems [3,11] such as using a software, which does not sufficiently satisfy the requirements regarding, e.g., reliability, fault tolerance, suitability, accuracy, interoperability. Therefore, it is mandatory to have a well-defined, efficient, reliable, and customizable COTS acquisition process (CAP) that soundly interfaces and integrates with other software development processes already in place.
During the past few years a variety of approaches for acquiring COTS software components have been proposed in academia and industry, such as in [4,10,12]. One of these, the OTSO method [4], has similarities with the approach described in this paper. The method proposed in [10] mainly consists of multiple screening steps on the set of alternatives, and reviews and re-/adjustments of the importance weights of the respective criteria. In the OTS component certification process [12] the decision criteria are the compatibility regarding required functionality and the robustness of the COTS software under evaluation. Generally, all these approaches aim at selecting one of the identified alternatives in any case. The option not to buy but to make the required software functionality is not present in the approaches described by other researchers.
The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 defines the CAP model at Siemens. Section 3 describes the setting of the case study,
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