Agile methods are proposed nowadays as a way to support software systems procurement. Most of the existing proposals such as eXtreme Programming or Scrum seem to conceive software procurement as an exercise of software development. However, a great deal of software systems are Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS)-based systems, in which the focus changes from bespoke software development to COTS selection and integration. Many proposals for COTS selection have been issued and therefore one may wonder how do they behave from the agile point of view. In this paper, we study the agile principles in the context of COTS selection and we analyze some of the most widespread existing methods. As a result, we identify some practices that would help in making COTS selection processes more agile.
Goal-and agent-oriented models have become a consolidated type of artifact in various software and knowledge engineering activities. Several languages exist for representing such type of models but there is a lack of associated methodologies for guiding their construction up to the necessary level of detail. In this paper we present RiSD, a method for building Strategic Dependency (SD) models in the i * notation. RiSD is defined in a prescriptive way to reduce uncertainness when constructing the model. RiSD tackles three fundamental issues: (1) it tends to reduce the average size of the resulting models; (2) it defines some traceability relationships among model elements; (3) it provides some lexical and syntactical conventions. As a result, we may say that RiSD supports the construction process of goal-and agent-oriented models whilst increasing their understanding.
Currently, information systems are mainly built by integrating or customizing Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components acquired or licensed from the marketplace. The processes necessary to steer a suitable acquisition are different from traditional software development processes. Among them, we are interested in the process of selection of COTS components. COTS selection requires discipline to coordinate the selection team and the set of new activities that are necessary to support a successful selection. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) contains important guidelines for process improvement, and specifies "what" we must have into account to achieve the disciplined processes (among others things). On the other hand, agile methods are playing nowadays an important role in software engineering practices, because they are specifying "how" the software practices must be addressed to attain agility and improvement in the software processes. The contribution of this work is to propose a framework to reconcile agile and discipline-based approaches in the COTS selection domain, by including agile practices into the 5 levels of CMMI for COTS acquisition.
The specification of a methodology defines a set of procedures and techniques that are associated to a specific domain. As part of this specification, it is advisable to establish a scope that allows identifying the set of roles and activities that should be covered to develop a life-cycle for a specific domain. If such a scope is not clearly defined in a methodology, some problems may arise, e.g., the set of roles in charge of carrying out the processes may lack of coordination, cooperation, and communication during the development of the life-cycle for the domain. In the Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components selection domain, there are currently different methodologies which define procedures and techniques to select or to license a COTS component from the marketplace. The application of these COTS selection methods results in processes that are different from usual development ones, yielding to new activities and responsibilities that should be defined in a scope which covers the interactions of specialized roles. However it may be observed that these methods do not put emphasis neither on the identification of these roles, nor on their subsequent interactions, nor on their combination to form a selection team. Furthermore, activities differ from one method to another. The contribution of this work is to define a scope for COTS selection processes, identifying and defining the undertaken activities, the roles that take place, their interactions and their responsibilities, and to organize a life-cycle around them. We use a goal-oriented approach, the i* notation, and a framework to model the engineering process, the OPEN Process Framework (OPF), with the purpose of issuing a well-defined work team that can adapt itself to the internal processes of a particular organization.
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