The market interest in developing reliable and stable products at shorter development time with reduced effort and cost has led to an increasing surge of interest in component-based software engineering. The development of software systems from the already built components has been motivated by the prospect of reduced cost and development time. The COTS-based System (CBS) development focuses on building large software systems by integrating previously existing software components. The success of these systems largely depends on effective selection and evaluation of components that meet user requirements. This paper presents a model for developing software with COTS components as well as without COTS component. The paper also shows the empirical findings associated with effort, time and cost, which is an outcome of a study aimed at using CBS for developing software.
As
the size and complexity of software systems grow, the interest in developing a
system based on reusable components increases. These reusable components or pre-existing
components are known as COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) Components (Carina Alves
and Jaelson Castro, 2001). The use of pre-existing software components, which
are not created by the organizations themselves, becomes ever more prevalent in
the creation of large software systems (Chris Abts et al., 2000). COTS
is a combination of two words: `Commercial' and `off-the-shelf'. The meaning of
the term `commercial' is a product customarily used for general purpose and sold,
leased or licensed to the general public. As for the term `off-the-shelf', it
means that the item is not to be developed by the user, but already exists (Maurizio
and Tohiano, 2002). COTS components can be incorporated into other systems under
development, so that developing system and the generic components form a single
entity (Jeffrey, 1998).
Software
development using COTS components provide a huge increase in productivity and
functionality with shorter development time and cost as per requirment of the
user. The software development by integrating COTS components, that are packaged
as stand-alone programs, differs significantly from traditional software development
(Yogesh et al., 2000). |
