Attribute-Based COTS Product Interoperability Assessment

Software systems today are frequently composed from prefabricated commercial components that provide complex functionality and engage in complex interactions. Such projects that utilize multiple commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products often confront interoperability conflicts resulting in budget and schedule overruns. These conflicts occur because of the incompatible assumptions made by developers of these products. Identification of such conflicts and planning strategies to resolve them is critical for developing such systems under budget and schedule constraints. Unfortunately, acquiring information to perform interoperability analysis is a time-intensive process. Moreover, increase in the number of COTS products available to fulfill similar functionality leads to hundreds of COTS product combinations, further complicating the COTS interoperability assessment landscape. In this paper we present a set of attributes that can be used to define COTS interoperability-specific characteristics. COTS product definitions based on these attributes can be used to perform high-level and automated interoperability assessment to filter out COTS product combinations whose integration will not be feasible within project constraints. In addition to above stated attributes, we present a tool that can be used to assess COTS-based architectures for interoperability conflicts, reducing the overall effort spent in performing interoperability analysis. Our preliminary experience in using the framework indicates an increase in interoperability assessment productivity by 50% and accuracy by 20%