A Comprehensive Reuse Model For COTS Software Products

Use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products in software development can improve a product’s quality and reduce development time. However, it also can require a considerable integration effort. Early estimation of this effort will help developers to choose the right COTS products and to decide whether to develop their own software instead of using COTS. In this work we propose a COTS reuse process to help software developers evaluate COTS products and integrate the selected COTS products into their systems. The process also includes an approach for designing the architecture for COTS-based software systems and overcoming other incompatibilities between COTS products and the system. The process is based on the comprehensive reuse model by Basili and Rombach, and a classification scheme for software component incompatibilities. To test the model, projects from a graduate software engineering class were used. These empirical data showed that the incompatibility classification and the proposed integration solutions were sufficiently sound and were used to improve the model