A Hierarchy of COTS Certification Criteria

Abstract

At the same time as we recognize that generic forms of software reuse have fallen short of their expectations (in terms of gains in process productivity, product quality, and time to market), we also find that specialized forms of software reuse, such as commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) based development and product-line engineering (PLE), have a great deal of potential in practice. To reap the benefits of practicing these two specialized forms of software reuse, COTS components can be used in product lines to streamline the development process. However, acquiring commercial components for a product line carries several risks. Testing and certification techniques are essentially required to assess the suitability of a COTS component for integration in a product-line architecture. The National Product Line Asset Center (NPLACE) is confronted with the problem of developing certification and suitability testing criteria for several COTS components in the market. In this paper, we develop a hierarchical reference model to guide the development of COTS certification criteria. We use an example of a database management system (DBMS) to illustrate the applicability of the model.