DesCOTS: A Software
System for Selecting COTS Components
Selection
of commercial-off-the-shelf software
components (COTS components) has a growing importance in software
engineering. Unfortunately, selection projects have a high risk of
ending up into abandonment
or yielding an incorrect selection. The use of some software
engineering
practices such as the definition of quality models can reduce this
risk. We
defined a process for COTS components selection based on the use of
quality
models and we started to apply it in academic and industrial cases. The
need of
having a tool to support this process arose and, although some tools
already
exist to partially support the involved activities, none of them was
suitable
enough. Because of this we developed DesCOTS, a software system that
embraces
several tools that interact to support the different activities of our
process.
The system has been designed taking into account not only functional
concerns
but also non-functional aspects such as reusability, interoperability
and
portability. We present in this paper the different subsystems of
DesCOTS and
discuss about their applicability.