The Limitations of Current Decision-Making Techniques in the Procurement of COTS Software Components

Abstract

The fundamentals of good decision-making are, first, a clear understanding of the decision itself and second t he availability of properly focused information to support the decision. Decision-making techniques help with both these problems. However, the techniques should be thought of as aids to decision-making and not the substitutes for it. Numerous decision-making techniques have been proposed as effective methods of ranking software products for selection for use as components in large-scale systems. Many of these techniques have been developed and successfully applied in other arenas and have been either used directly or adapted to be applied to COTS product evaluation and selection. This paper will show that many of these techniques are not valid when applied in this manner. We will describe an alternate requirements-driven technique that could be more effective.

A Component Selection Framework for COTS Libraries

“…It is not only a matter of precision, but also an efficient way to deal with a huge amount of information. A high number of candidates becomes quickly fastidious in the case of a manual evaluation [20].…”

A State-of-the-Practice Survey of Off-the-Shelf Component-Based Development Processes

“…Some studies focused on the whole software development lifecycle [1], [3], [10]. Others investigated the specific phase, especially in COTS component selection and evaluation [5], [8], [9], [11], [12], [13], [14].…”

“…Some of the direct assessment processes, such as OTSO [5], CAP [13], and CISD [8], assume that the requirements are fixed and select the COTS components by comparing how well the COTS component candidates satisfy the requirements. A formal decision-making process is usually used to select the "best" COTS component [12]. The formal decision-making process usually includes three basic elements: selecting evaluation criteria (factors), collecting and assigning values to these criteria, and applying formal decision-making algorithms such as MAUT [9], MCDA [11], and AHP [14].…”

Interactive Decision Support for Multiobjective COTS Selection

“…Inefficient decisions not only affect the correctness, quality and dependability of a COTS-based application, they may also cause substantial cost increases with respect to the development process and/or future maintenance activities [1], [7], [8]. Moreover, customers will be dissatisfied if they feel that their preferences have not been given adequate consideration [9].…”