COTS Products Characterization

A way to learn about Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) products is to define a set of characteristics or attributes and then to collect information about these attributes. In an industrial context, the attributes used to select COTS clearly depend on project specific goals. In our educational context we made an attempt to define general COTS characterization attributes. The resulting framework provides a structure, which facilitate the learning process. Our proposed attributes have several similarities with the generic evaluation attributes defined by ISO 9126. A comparison with such a standard provides a deeper insight into the problem of characterizing COTS products