A goal-oriented strategy for supporting commercial off-the-shelf components selection

The use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components is becoming a strategic need because they offer the possibility to build systems at reduced costs and within shorter development time. Having efficient and reliable COTS components selection methods is a key issue not only for exploiting the potential benefits of this technology, but also for facing the problems and risks involved. Searching COTS components requires to overcome several obstacles: the growing size and evolvability of the COTS marketplace, the dependencies from the components to be selected with others, and the type of descriptions currently available for those components. In this paper, we present a goal-oriented strategy for an effective localization, analysis and structuring of COTS components information. Our proposal is the GOThIC method, which provides methodological support to the construction of taxonomies. We present the seven activities that conform this method, which are illustrated with the case of real-time synchronous communication tools.