On the efficiency of domain-based COTS product selection method

Use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products is becoming a popular software development method. Current methods of selecting COTS products involve using the intuition of software developers or use a direct assessment (DA) of the products. The former approach is subjective, whereas the latter approach is expensive. This high cost is because the efficiency of the DA approach is inversely proportional to the product of the number of modules in the system to be developed and the total number of modules in the candidate COTS products. With the increase in the number of available COTS components, the time spent on choosing the appropriate COTS products could easily offset the advantages of using them. Neither of the selection approaches mentioned leads to quality results. Furthermore, inappropriately chosen COTS components may cause much greater damage to a development project than faults in software units that are developed in-house. A domain model is a generic model of the domain of an application system. It captures all of the features and characteristics of the domain. We have developed a new indirect selection approach, called the domain-based COTS product selection method, which makes use of domain models. We have successfully applied our selection method to the development of an on-line margin trading application. In this paper, we first analyze the efficiency of the domain-based COTS product selection method qualitatively. Then, we study the efficiency of the method by means of a formal approach and also through the case study of the on-line margin trading application. All of these results show that the domain-based COTS product selection method is more efficient than the DA methods. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.