Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2004
Balancing Stakeholder's Preferences on Measuring Cots Component Functional Suitability
Alejandra Cechich Milen, Mario Piattini Velthuis
COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) components can be incorporated into other systems to help software developers to produce a new system, so that both artefacts — components and the system — form a single functional entity. In that way, developing software becomes a matter of balancing required and offered functionality between the parties. But required functionality is highly dependent on component’s users, i.e. stakeholders of a COTS component selection process. Inputs to this process include discussions with composers, reuse architects, business process coordinators, and so forth. In this paper, we present an approach for balancing stakeholder’s preferences, which can be used in the process of measuring functional suitability of COTS candidates. We describe and illustrate the use of our proposal to weight requirements of components and determine suitable COTS candidates for given software.