COTS-based systems (CBS) include commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products besides newly written (in-house) software. The most important features of COTS products are their suitability for integration into different systems and commercial availability. These aspects allow COTS products to provide high quality prepackaged functionality. Therefore, the use of COTS products as components of a new system can reduce development effort and increase system quality. As a result, CBS development can significantly aid developers in building a better product in a shorter time.

However, CBS development may introduce specific problems such as

-         Evaluation: COTS products must be evaluated to decide whether or not they should be used during development;

-         Integration: in-house software and COTS products have their own assumptions regarding interfaces, packaging, functionality, etc.; if these assumptions are different, integration work will be necessary to make COTS products work in the system;

-         Security: COTS can provide a source of a security hazard, permitting a dangerous behavior due to a Trojan horse or just an accidental failure;

-         Maintenance: since COTS products are subject to frequent updates by their vendors, inconsistent version incompatibilities can result in serious maintenance problems.

 

Software developers should know how to overcome these problems in order to use COTS products successfully. Although many useful COTS-related works have been published, more research still needs to be completed to make CBS profitable.

Meanwhile, these problems can hinder CBS development, creating the potential for schedule overrun or for product quality to deteriorate. Therefore, a practical approach to evaluation and integration of COTS software would help software developers to solve the problems and reduce related risks, thus allowing the developers to benefit considerably from using COTS products.

One of CeBASE goals is the investigation of problems concerning the CBS and the development of descriptive and prescriptive models of COTS integration processes that can help software developers use COTS products. Specifically, we are going to use empirical data to design and validate the models.

Successful research should result in the development of CBS models that will help software developers evaluate and integrate COTS products into their systems and to solve other COTS-related problems. In addition, these models could be helpful for other researchers as a reference point for their work.