TAES COTS THOROUGH APPROACH FOR EVALUATION SELECTION OF COTS PRODUCTS

Abstract

Traditional software development process is gradually being replaced by Commercial Off-theshelf (COTS) based software development (CBSD). The reason for this replacement is the availability of ready-made software packages. There are numerous benefits to the use of packaged software, reduced cost and less development time being few. The selection of only the most suitable COTS software product is an indispensable task in CBSD that should be done circumspectly. The success of such a development depends on the evaluation & selection methodology being followed. A perfect evaluation approach is expected to separate the wheat from the chaff. Various evaluation approaches have been proposed over the last few decades which rely on different criteria for singling out favorable contenders but the absence of a formal method indicates that this area of research is still miles away from its heyday. Thorough approach for evaluation and selection of COTS products (TAES-COTS) proposed in this thesis is an approach that evaluates COTS products based on progressive filtration. It is a five step approach that evaluates products against different criteria at three different stages. It evaluates COTS software based on both functional and non-functional requirements and assists the evaluators in choosing the optimal software product in times of uncertainty. Effort has been made to come up with an approach that overcomes the limitations found in other approaches with the objective of being thorough enough to cover all aspects of COTS software selection and at the same time being simple enough to be practically implementable. To save the evaluators some time, this approach is accompanied by a prototype tool “COTSEVAL” that helps the examiners conduct the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) based evaluation