ABSTRACT
Use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products has become a popular software development trend. The success of a COTS-based development project is highly dependent on the ability of selecting the most appropriate COTS without using a relatively large effort. In this chapter, we will first identify the basic strategies in COTS product selection: best-fit and first-fit strategies. Then, we describe the key challenges in selecting COTS products and present the common evaluation techniques used for COTS products. We will review several direct assessment selection methods, such as the off-the-shelf option, COTS-based integrated system development, procurement-oriented requirements engineering, COTS-based requirements engineering, the infrastructure incremental development approach, and the comparative evaluation process. Strengths and weaknesses of these COTS selection methods will be compared. The indirect assessment method named domain-based COTS product selection method will be introduced and applied to a case study concerning the development of an online margin-trading system for a large, leading bank in Hong Kong using COTS products. The case study will demonstrate that the indirect assessment method reduces the complexity and improves the efficiency of COTS product selection.
