An empirical study of variations in COTS-based software development processes in the Norwegian IT industry

Abstract

More and more software projects use Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. Although previous studies have proposed specific COTS-based development processes, there are few empirical studies that investigate how to use and customize COTS-based development processes for different project contexts. This paper describes an exploratory study of state-of-the-practice of COTS-based development processes. Sixteen software projects in the Norwegian IT companies have been studied by structured interviews. The results are that COTS-specific activities can be successfully incorporated in most traditional development processes (such as waterfall or prototyping), given proper guidelines to reduce risks and provide specific assistance. We have identified four COTS-specific activities-the build vs. buy decision, COTS component selection, learning and understanding COTS components, and COTS component integration -and one new role, that of a knowledge keeper. We have also found a special COTS component selection activity for unfamiliar components, combining Internet searches with hands-on trials. The process guidelines are expressed as scenarios, problems encountered, and examples of good practice. They can be used to customize the actual development processes, such as in which lifecycle phase to put the new activities into. Such customization crucially depends on the project context, such as previous familiarity with possible COTS components and flexibility of requirements.

An empirical study on selection of Open Source Software - Preliminary results

“…Nevertheless, the observations reported here are in line with other empirical studies on the selection of OSS and COTS [5,15,16,19,30]. Even though this study focused on the selection of OSS the results may also be valid for COTS selection.…”

“…Similar observations about both the iterative nature of development of evaluation criteria [21] and the use of ad hoc selection processes [15,19] have been made by others. It is therefore quite surprising that the research community has reflected so little over the influence this has on software selection and the use of normative selection methods and general evaluation schemas.…”

A State-of-the-Practice Survey of Off-the-Shelf Component-Based Development Processes

“…Our investigation on COTS-based development process in Norwegian IT companies, however, revealed that the main COTS-based development process is to customize the traditional development process to account for use of COTS components [6]. In addition, in all our investigated projects, the project members decided the main process before they started to think about using COTS components.…”

“…The formal decision-making process usually includes three basic elements: selecting evaluation criteria (factors), collecting and assigning values to these criteria, and applying formal decision-making algorithms such as MAUT [9], MCDA [11], and AHP [14]. However, both the study of Torchiano and Morisio [16] and our exploratory study [6] showed that these formal selection methods were seldom used. In fact, our exploratory study discovered two other popularly used selection processes.…”

“…Within a first, exploratory study, we investigated the commonalities and differences between development processes in 16 COTS-based software projects in Norway [6]. The study summarized several variations in COTS-based development processes and concluded that the customization of such development processes crucially depends on the project context, such as familiarity with possible COTS components and flexibility of requirements.…”