COTS Software Evaluation Techniques

Employing Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) software products as components in large-scale long-lived systems has been proposed as a way to reduce both implementation and operating cost for the user communities. While this may be the case, the actual benefits have not been confirmed. However, there is factual evidence that some of the suggested cost savings will be offset by the need to address a new set of issues that are raised by the inclusion of COTS components. One of these is the need to evaluate candidates COTS systems early in the development life cycle. Our research is concentrated in the area of physical evaluation of candidate products, that is, actual testing of the products themselves. The purpose of this paper is to present a discussion of proposed evaluation techniques used to select COTS software components for systems development, to describe appropriate testing techniques for COTS candidates, and to propose an evaluation system which will provide support to ensure timely selection of suitable COTS products.