Defining a Scope for COTS Selection Methods

Abstract

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.