Repositories for Cots Selection

Selecting commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products is a challenging process that utilizes and generates a lot of information. Repositories play a crucial role in the management of the COTS selection information. In fact, it is generally believed in literature that repositories are of great importance to the COTS selection process and indeed to the entire process of developing software using COTS products. However, the process of developing, managing, and accessing these repositories has attracted very little attention. This paper presents a framework for establishing and maintaining the following five different repositories for the COTS selection process: COTS repository, user repository, discussions repository, lessons-learned repository, and historical information repository. The framework supports distributed contribution and access to the repositories, as well as systematic and hierarchical evaluation and integration of the contributions. Moreover, this paper presents a description of a database that was implemented as part of a decision support system (DSS) for the selection of COTS products. The database accommodates the different repositories for the COTS selection process