Open source collaboration for fostering off-the-shelf components selection

The use of Off-The-Shelf software components in Component-Based Development implies many challenges. One of them is the lack of available and well-suited data to support selection of suitable OTS components. This paper proposes a feasible and incremental way to federate and reuse the different efforts for finding, selecting, and maintaining OTS components in a structured way. This is done not only for supporting OTS components selection, but also to overcome reported problems with the integration and maintenance of component repositories. It is based on the "open source collaboration" idea to incrementally build an OTS components reuse infrastructure, enabling automatic support for OTS selection processes.