A COTS architectural component specification stencil for selection and reasoning
Jing Dong, Sheng Chih Yang, Lawrence Chung, Paulo Carvalho de Alencar, Donald D. Cowan · 2005
Reusing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components may reduce cost and time-to-market. It may significantly improve software productivity. However, the selection and assessment of COTS components are still a challenge task. It is hard to find the right components that exactly fit into the requirements. The selection processes are in general ad-hoc. Wrong choice of COTS components may compromise the benefits from reusing these components since the chosen component may mismatch with other components and the environment. In this position paper, we advocate a more detailed architectural specification stencil which may help on the component selection and mismatch detection. The architectural specification of a COTS component is encoded in XML so that searching components can be automated. In addition, inconsistencies and mismatches among components can be detected.