Workshop Overview
Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software components (hereafter, COTS) play an increasingly important role in software systems development. Successful COTS-based system development requires some particular activities to be performed, among which we find COTS evaluation. This activity is one of the cornerstones of COTS selection, COTS implementation and development
of cost models for COTS. Its importance and also its complexity are growing more and more due to the increasing number of COTS domains and products available (with open-source components in particular). As a consequence, models for representing the evaluation criteria and the evaluations themselves, as well as the process to conduct the evaluation activity, are needed.
Goals
The main goals of this workshop are the following:
- To provide a forum in which researchers and practitioners working in the subject may share proposals and experiences
- To stimulate discussions among participants better than just attending to talks
- To establish a network of researchers and practitioners interested in the topic
- To create an atmosphere able to exploit synergies for facilitating joint collaboration among different research and practitioners groups
- To write down a research agenda with the most important issues highlighted during the workshop
Format
The workshop will be organized according to the following:
- A keynote opening speech
- Short presentations of the accepted contributions
- Identification of open issues to discuss
- Discussion in small groups
- Wrap-up session and future agenda
Topics
The workshop is intended to cover topics related to COTS evaluation, from theoretical foundations to empirical studies, including the following (but are not limited to):
- Formal representation of evaluation criteria (ontologies, data models, …)
- Definition and use of software quality models for representing quality criteria
- Management of non-technical criteria (supplier characteristics, legal issues, …)
- Requirements-driven vs. reusable COTS evaluation
- COTS evaluation maintainability (especially with COTS versions)
- Reusability of (parts of) COTS evaluations
- COTS evaluation data bases
- Third-party organizations and their impact on business processes
- Certification of COTS
- Selection of open source COTS
- COTS supplier involvement in the evaluation process
- Definition and validation of software metrics
- Examples of use of software metrics
- Metrics definition processes and techniques (GQM, …)
- Methods, processes and techniques involving COTS evaluation: software quality assurance methodologies, COTS selection processes, etc.
- Actors involved in the COTS evaluation process
- Impact of COTS granularity, COTS domain and organization type and size in the COTS evaluation process
- Case studies in COTS evaluation
- Tool-support for COTS evaluation