Lisa Brownsword

Developing new processes for COTS-based systems

Although commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products are becoming increasingly popular, little information is available on how they affect existing software development processes or what new processes are needed. At Carnegie Mellon Universitys Software Engineering Institute (SEI), we are developing a process framework for working with COTS-based systems.

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.

Implications of Using the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMIi©) for COTS-Based Systems

Using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to meet the needs of business or operational applications is an increasing trend. Practical experience is showing that building systems using COTS products requires new skills and different processes. Practitioners are finding that building and supporting COTS-based systems demands more, not less, management and engineering discipline. Many organizations have derived substantial benefits through process improvement using Capability Maturity Models (CMM©s) and want to leverage previous investments in process improvement to build COTS-based systems. In addition, organizations building COTS-based systems want to begin applying the CMMI©. This leads to the question, How should the CMMI be interpreted for organizations building, fielding, and supporting a COTSbased system? This paper provides high-level guidance on interpreting and using CMMI practices in a way that facilitates the definition and development of appropriate processes for COTS-based systems.

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.

Promises, Expectations, and Realities of Interoperability: from COTS to Systems of Systems

Commercial and government organizations are increasingly dependent on multiple systems that will operate seamlessly together both within their own enterprise as well as across organizational boundaries. Defining, building, fielding, and evolving these systems of systems is sufficiently different from traditional single system development that changes to engineering, management, and organizational practices is necessary. This tutorial explores the differences of systems of systems and leverage applicable lessons from acquiring, fielding, evolving COTS-based systems

Best paper award 2005: Using earned value management for COTS-Based systems: issues and recommendations

Earned value management (EVM) has long been used by organizations to plan, monitor, and control the development and evolution of custom developed systems. EVM was developed for managing such projects, and assumes a waterfall development model. COTS-based systems (CBS), on the other hand, are formed and evolved through the selection and composition of pre-existing, off-the-shelf packages or components with potentially some number of custom components. Experience indicates that a spiral or iterative development process is a key to success with CBS. While EVM has been applied to CBS projects, the results have not been uniformly satisfying. This paper explores the fundamental challenges in using EVM with CBS, and proposes adaptations to some of the principals of EVM to render it more suitable for CBS development.

Tutorial 1: Modeling Key Dynamics in Complex Systems (of Systems) Environments: Foundational Concepts

The transition from systems that provide a pre-defined product to ongoing relationships that focus on supporting dynamically changing customer needs over time is moving suppliers from a product-delivery mode to one in which through-life capability management is expected. Appropriately modeling both supply and demand provides participants in this context with a richer understanding of risks and risk mitigations associated with their delivery strategy. This tutorial presents foundational concepts for modeling approaches along with a number of modeling techniques that address different aspects of customer-supplier relationships in dynamic environments.

Managing the COTS Chaos: Experiences from the Trenches Using the Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems

With increasing pressure to remain competitive in their respective markets, many commercial companies are turning to a greater use of COTS products to provide more capability faster to their end-users. Early attempts to leverage COTS products using existing waterfall-oriented development approaches have met with many failures. As a result, organizations are searching for more viable alternatives. This presentation shares the early experiences of one commercial project to identify and transition from a waterfall development process to a process explicitly designed to leverage the commercial marketplace and other sources of existing components to form delivered solutions.