Definition and Classification of COTS: A Proposal

COTS based development impacts several issues in software development. New techniques have been proposed, or existing ones have been adapted. Several approaches have been proposed for effort and size estimation, product selection, and architectural mismatches identification. But a fundamental question must be clarified before: what is a COTS product? According to the literature a COTS seems to be anything from an operating system to a UI widget. It appears obvious that a finer level of granularity is required if we want to acquire a deeper insight in COTS related issues. This paper proposes a COTS classification scheme, which is as inclusive as possible. It is intended to provide both researchers and practitioners a tool to characterize more precisely their work. The next research step will be validating, by speculation first and empirically later, the influence of COTS classes on issues in COTS based development.