Domain analysis for supporting commercial off-the-shelf components selection

Abstract

Though new technological trends and paradigms arise for developing complex software systems, systematic reuse continues to be an elusive goal. As a consequence, the need for designing effective strategies for enabling large-scale reuse, whilst overcoming the risks involved in the use of a particular technology, still remains. In this context, the adoption of the Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) technology introduces many challenges that still have not been fully overcome, such as the lack of comprehensive mechanisms to record and manage the required information for supporting COTS components selection. In this paper we present a domain analysis strategy for gathering the information needed to describe COTS market segments in a way that COTS components selection becomes more effective and efficient. Due to the diversity of the information to capture, we propose different dimensions of interest for COTS selection that are covered by different domain models. These models are articulated by means of a single framework based on a widespread software quality standard.