A knowledge-based cots-aware requirements engineering approach

The goals of developing systems better, faster, and cheaper continue to drive software engineering practitioners and researchers to investigate software engineering methodologies. In requirements engineering, the focus has been on modeling the software engineering process and products for systems that are being built from scratch. As the size and complexity of systems continues to grow the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) components is being viewed more and more as a promising, and also perhaps inevitable, solution. The effective use of COTS components, however, requires a systematic approach that provides a set of concepts for modeling the subject matter, a set of guidelines for using such concepts, and tool support to assist the developer. In this paper, we present a COTS-Aware Requirements Engineering (CARE) approach that explicitly supports the use of COTS components. Our CARE approach is knowledge based, has a defined process, and is agent- and goal-oriented. In particular, we present part of our meta-model for the knowledge base and a prototype of the CARE Assistant Tool. Our CARE approach is validated using a part of a Digital Library System example