Quality Attributes for COTS Components
Manuel F. Bertoa, Antonio Vallecillo · 2002
As Component-based Software Development (CBSD) starts to be e#ectively used, some software vendors have commenced to successfully sell and licence commercial o#-the-shelf (COTS) components. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is the selection of the COTS components that meet the user's requirements. Current proposals have shown how to deal with the functional aspects of this evaluation process. However, there is a lack of appropriate quality models that allow an e#ective assessment of COTS components. Besides, the international standards that address the software products' quality issues (in particular, those from ISO and IEEE) have shown to be too general for dealing with the specific characteristics of software components. In this paper we propose a quality model for CBSD based on ISO 9126, that defines a set of quality attributes and their associated metrics for the e#ective evaluation of COTS components.