Investigating Conflicts in Cots Decision-Making

The development of COTS-based systems largely depends on the success of the selection process. This activity encompasses the evaluation of COTS packages against customer requirements, so that it is necessary to perform a complex decision-making process to select the most suitable package. We argue that analysing the matching between features and requirements is a core task of COTS decision-making. In particular, it is very likely that mismatches occur, as COTS are designed to meet very general requirements rather than specific needs. In this paper, we investigate the different types of conflicts that can arise from these mismatches. We propose a goal driven framework to deal with such conflicts. We demonstrate the approach with the mail server case study.