Improving Processes for Commercial Off - the - Shelf - Based Systems

F or many programs, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products offer the promise of rapid delivery to end users, shared development costs with other customers , and an opportunity to expand business and mission capabilities and performance as improvements are made in the marketplace. But the promise of COTS products is often not realized in practice. Why? An important factor is that organizations tend either to assume that COTS products can be simply thrown together, or they fall back on familiar, traditional development skills, which have been shown not to work in developing and maintaining a COTS-based system [1]. Practical experience shows that building systems using COTS products requires new skills, knowledge, and abilities; changed roles and responsibilities; and different processes [1]. Many organizations find that COTS-based systems can be complex and are often costly to build and maintain. Moreover, practitioners are finding that management and engineering processes for a COTS-based system 1 must be more (not less) disciplined. This article characterizes the unique aspects of defining, building, fielding, and supporting a COTS-based system; describes the Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS based systems SM (EPIC SM) (which was designed to show how COTS aspects can be addressed [2]), and identifies high-level guidance to facilitate the definition of appropriate work processes for both developers and maintainers of COTS-based systems using the Capability Maturity Model ®