Cecilia Albert

Meeting the Challenges of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Products: The Information Technology Solutions Evolution Process (ITSEP)

Government and private organizations are escalating their use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products in critical business systems. These organizations find that the traditional development approach rarely works; that is, the process of defining requirements, formulating an architecture, and then trying to find COTS products to meet the specified requirements within the defined architecture. We describe an alternative approach, based on the Rational Unified Process? (RUP), that modifies the acquisition and development processes to more effectively leverage the COTS marketplace through concurrent discovery and negotiation of user needs and business processes, applicable COTS technology and products, the target architecture, and programmatic constraints.

COTS-Based Development: Taking the Pulse of a Project

Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS)-based systems demand new indicators for determining a projects progress and its potential for success. Research by the COTS-based system (CBS) Initiative at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has shown that organizations building, acquiring, or supporting systems that rely on COTS products experience a consistent set, or pattern, of problems. These patterns provide the foundation for SEI seminars and workshops that present high-level keys to success along with activities or artifacts to look for in successful COTS-based system projects. These same patterns underlie the SEI COTS usage risk evaluation (CURE) technique for conducting a detailed risk analysis of the use of COTS products within an ongoing project. This paper reports on work that expands these efforts to provide an easily used mechanism to help organizations avoid inadequate practices and employ improved ones--in effect, to allow program managers to take the pulse of their COTS-based projects.