COTS acquisition process: incorporating business factors into COTS vendor evaluation taxonomies
James Miller, Hean Chin Yeoh · Software Process Improvement and Practice · 2006
The increasingly prevalent use of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components in software development has attracted a huge capital pool to the industry. The result is an industry that is characterized by strong forces of change and weak resistance. Under such environment, weaker players are constantly displaced by stronger players, and older technologies are constantly displaced by emerging technologies. This phenomenon has brought about a new class of risk, namely, vendor business factors, to the COTS acquisition community. However, the existing COTS vendor evaluation taxonomies remain product centric, focusing only on product and cost-related factors. This article extends the taxonomies to incorporate Vendor Business Factors into COTS selection process. The resulting model is named VERPRO (Vendor Economics and Risk Profiler). The foundation of VERPRO lies within a measurement-based vendor evaluation taxonomy that categorizes the evaluation criteria into four main factors: product, cost, service, and business. VERPRO enables the acquisition community to incorporate business factors into vendor selection process and provides a revolutionary approach that merges the knowledge of financial analysis into software engineering. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.