Abstract:
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Selection of commercial-off-the-shelf software components (COTS
Components) has a growing importance in software engineering.
Unfortunately, selection projects have a high risk of ending up into
abandonment or yielding an incorrect selection. The use of some software
engineering practices such as the definition of quality models can
reduce this risk. We defined a process for COTS components selection
based on the use of quality models and we started to apply it in
academic and industrial cases. The need of having a tool to support this
process arose and, although it already exists some tools to partially
support the involved activities, none of them was suitable enough.
Because of this we developed DesCOTS, a software system that embraces
several tools that interact to support the different activities of our
process. The system has been designed taking into account not only
functional concerns but also non-functional aspects such as reusability,
interoperability and portability. We present in this paper the different
subsystems of DesCOTS and discuss about their applicability. |