COTS workshop

Abstract

In early June of 2000 a COTS Workshop entitled "Continuing Collaborations for Successful COTS Development" was held in Limerick, Ireland in conjunction with ICSE 2000. The purpose of the workshop was to collect experience reports regarding the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software to build systems, identify best-practices for the use of COTS software, and to establish a research agenda for those researchers interested in COTS-based software systems. This one and a half day workshop was an extension of the work begun during the workshop entitled "Ensuring Successful COTS Development" held in conjunction with ICSE '99. Results from that workshop demonstrated that there were a number of common research areas, including acquisition, planning and management, architecture and implementation, and evaluation and testing, for which researchers saw the possibility of collaboration. These areas included specific topics such as estimating the effort required to implement COTS-based systems, classification of architectural styles, and certification of COTS products for reliability and safety. The group will reconvene at ICSE'01 (www.csr.uvic.ca/icse2001) to discuss further the results achieved.The ICSE 2000 Workshop had about 26 participants and was formatted as a combination of plenary sessions and small breakout groups that worked on specific issues related to COTS-based systems. The breakout groups investigated the impact of COTS software usage in the following areas: Economic and financial issues. Requirements definition Software engineering process. Integration, maintenance and system management. Business models. Each breakout group tried to identify the current state of the art in COTS software usage as well as open questions that could provide the basis for further research in the coming years. Each group was responsible for producing a written summary of their discussions which are included, without major editing, below. A more complete description of the workshop, as well as all the participants' position papers, can be found at:http://seg.iit.nrc.ca/projects/cots/icse2000wkshp/index.html

Not All CBS Are Created Equally: COTS-Intensive Project Types

“…A number of researchers [1,2,7,20] have identified the existence of different types of CBS, and have affirmed that the process and activities involved to be followed in developing each type of system largely differs. There are several proposed CBA development processes such as described in [1,2,3,4,6,7,20].…”

“…There are several proposed CBA development processes such as described in [1,2,3,4,6,7,20]. The authors of [20] have classified COTS based systems based on the manner in which the COTS product is used in the system.…”

“…There are a multitude of definitions for COTS [14,25,26,27], but for the purposes of this work we adopt the SEI COTS-Based System Initiative's definition [7] of a COTS product: "A product that is sold, leased, or licensed to the general public, offered by a vendor trying to profit from it, supported and evolved by the vendor, who retains the intellectual property rights, available in multiple identical copies and used without source code modification. "…”

Panel 2: Doing Software Maintenance for Business Change

“…Doing software maintenance with components can yield cost and time savings, and is as applicable to facilitating business change as in any other area [1]. Why not take advantage of the specialist skills and knowledge world-wide, instead of trying to make in-house software maintainers be "jacks of all trades"?…”