Improving process decisions in COTS‐based development via risk‐based prioritization

Abstract

Good project planning requires the use of appropriate process models as well as effective decision support techniques. However, current software process models provide very little Commercial Off‐the‐Shelf (COTS)‐specific insight and guidance on helping COTS‐based application developers to make better decisions with respect to their particular project situations. This article presents a risk‐based prioritization approach that is used in the context of a COTS Process Decision Framework. This method is particularly useful in supporting many dominant decisions during a COTS‐based development (CBD) process, such as establishing COTS assessment criteria, scoping and sequencing development activities, prioritizing features to be implemented in incremental development, etc. In this way, the method not only provides a basis for optimal COTS selection but also helps focus limited development resources on more critical tasks that represent greater risks. The article also shows the evaluation results of applying this approach on the COTS Process Decision Framework through an experiment. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

GuideArch: Guiding the exploration of architectural solution space under uncertainty

“…Identifying their concerns and prioritizing them in terms of risk and importance is the centerpiece of modern software engineering processes [21]. To that end, for each property p ∈ P , we define an integer π p ∈ [0, 10] indicating the priority of property p to stakeholders.…”

“…The higher the priority, the more important that property is to the stakeholders. We chose this particular representation of priority to be consistent with the existing literature [1], [21], which gives us some confidence that stakeholders can indeed priorities their concerns in this fashion.…”

“…Modern software processes advocate an iterative approach, where in each iteration the decisions made in the previous cycles are assessed and risks are mitigated [21]. Generally, it is desirable to resolve decisions that pose a high risk early on, and architecture is typically considered to provide the appropriate level of abstraction to enable such analysis [21].…”

“…Generally, it is desirable to resolve decisions that pose a high risk early on, and architecture is typically considered to provide the appropriate level of abstraction to enable such analysis [21].…”