COTS characterization model in a COTS-based development environment

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components are more and more used in the new applications development. They promise to reduce cost and risks, and to ensure software higher quality. However, in practice, many problems are faced during the evaluation, selection and integration. Major causes of these problems are due to the lack of knowledge about COTS products, the ignorance of the available methods of evaluation, selection and integration, and the lack of guidance for choosing between these methods. Therefore, a COTS-based development environment (CEDE) turns out to be essential. In this perspective, we propose a survey of COTS characterizations and propose an extended model. The use of these attributes in a CEDE is specified by a scenario denoted by a multimodel process known as map formalism. The same development process is then illustrated with a map scenario focusing on the different types of selection/integration existing methods.