A Process for Cots-selection and Mismatches Handling - A Goal-driven Approach

Organizations facing the difficulties and costs associated with the development of their information systems from scratch turn to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to build their systems. A crucial factor in the success of such project is to perform a good COTS decision-making process, a process that aims at defining the organizations’ requirements, evaluating existing products and selecting the one that best fits requirements. However, even the best-fitting product would not perfectly match requirements, this is referred to as COTS mismatches. These mismatches occur as a result of an excess or shortage of COTS capabilities. Many of these mismatches are resolved after the COTS selection. This paper presents a goal-driven agent-oriented approach for proceeding the COTS decision-making and analysing mismatches during and after the COTS selection. The methodology is overviewed and illustrated on a case study.