Reuse Of Cots Software And Software Components example essay topic

web "COTS Software Selection: The Need To Make Tradeoffs Between System Requirements, Architectures and COTS / Components"; N cube, Cornelius and Maiden, Neil; Center For HCI Design. This paper, presents a new research agenda to address problems of COTS software selection in the forthcoming decade. It describes the increasing shift towards software engineering based on COTS software packages, the limitations of current COTS / component-based software engineering methods and research efforts, and proposes a new research agenda to address the problems which arise from a software engineering process based on the reuse of COTS software and software components. The focus of the proposed research is how can we develop complex software systems by integrating together different combinations of COTS software packages and software components. Even though this paper leaves a lot of open issues, it presents a great method for requirements engineering for COTS software selection, then critiques it and identifies possible new research directions and future solutions. This paper provides many great examples and diagrams to help you understand what is being talk about thought out the paper.

For further investigation, there is an excellent reference list that has 13 references listed, that are from very good sources. web "The Ballista Project; COTS Software Robustness Testing"; Koopman, Prof. Phil; Carnegie Mellon University. This paper covers The Ballista automated robustness testing approach probes software to see how effective it is at exception handling. For example, Ballista testing can find ways to make operation systems crash, and can make other software packages suffer abnormal termination instead of gracefully returning error indications. Ballista testing enables users to test the robustness of home-grown and third party software on their own computers. Ballista is a "black box" software testing tool, and is works well on testing the APIs of Commercial Off-The-Self (COTS) software.

Ballista started as a DARPA - funded research project, and is now largely completed. Ballista changes this by providing a simple, repeatable way to directly measure software robustness without requiring source code or behavioral specifications. As a result, product developers can use robustness metrics to compare off-the-shelf software components, and component developers can measure their effectiveness at exception handling. This paper was kind of complex and did not really have too much good information written it in. It was hard to understand and you really had to get into the paper and dig for the information in order to be able to find it.

This paper was not a very good reference at all. It did not provide a list of reference or any type of bibliography, so it would not be a good source for further investigation. web "Using Commercial - Off - The Self (COTS) Software in High Consequence Safety Systems"; Scott, John A. and Preckshot, G. Gary. This paper is based on work performed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 1 to assist the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in understanding the state of the art with respect to applying commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software to high-consequence safety systems. These systems, for which the consequences of failure can be severe or catastrophic, must be developed, implemented, and maintained in ways that provide assurance that catastrophic consequences will be prevented.

This paper discusses various aspects of the question of using commercially available software in these systems. Risk, grading, and system assessment are discussed, and relevant standards are summarized. A recommendation for addressing key issues regarding the use of commercial software in high-consequence safety systems is given. Given the current state of the art in software engineering and the technical, political, and maintenance considerations associated with typical commercial software, it appears that it will be difficult at best to incorporate COTS software products into high-consequence safety systems. If an effective grading process is in place, however, the tradeoffs associated with the use of COTS products in lower risk categories become more palatable This was a very well written paper, which may it easy to understand and helped me to learn things myself, as I read this paper. There are many good examples throughout the paper, along with great models and charts to help us better understand about COTS.

This paper had 5 references included on the reference list that could possibly be used as a good source for further investigation. web "Problems With COTS Software; A Case Study"; Beheshti, Jamshid and Dupuis, John; McGill University. This paper reports on the use of Commercial - Off - The - Self (COTS) software for developing a dynamic environment for an online public access catalogue (OPAC). COTS products are widely used throughout the industry. While there are many potential benefits, use of COTS components is also fraught with pitfalls. The research on creating a dynamic environment for O PACs is based on the previous work in this area, Public Access Catalogue Extension (PACE), which was developed with custom-based software programs. Although in the previous research project all the programs all the programs were successfully developed in C and C++, the present project relied very little on original and custom programming.

Instead, a number of COTS products were used to construct the dynamic environment: Macromedia Director, 3 D Dreams, Extreme 3 D, Crossroads, and Easy base. These COTS products were chosen for their ability to produce the desired results, their availability at reasonable costs, and their capability to integrate with one another. The paper also states that developers indicate that while COTS products might be suitable for applications in "known environments" custom architecture should be considered for new and unexplored projects. This paper was very well written. It was very easy to read and understand exactly what was being said. The paper described everything step by step along the way and gave a table at the end with the results and exactly how they came about.

For further investigation, there is an excellent reference list that has 17 references listed, that are from very good sources, to choose from. web "Towards Diversity Of COTS Software Applications: Reducing Risks of Widespread Faults and Attacks"; Mont, Marco Casas sa; Baldwin, Adrian; Beres, Yolanda; Harrison, Keith; Sadler, Martin and Ship, Simon; HP Laboratories Bristol; June 26, 2002. This paper introduces an alternative approach to diversity which takes advantage of the component ization of modern commercial software. Critical software components are identified during the risk assessment phase and multiple (functionally equivalent) implementations are developed. These multiple implementations of components are distributed within software installation packages. The paper also states that experiments based on simulations show that there is a clear advantage to increasing diversity of standard components to help in managing attacks. It is clear to see from the results stated in the paper, that both the number of infected systems and the speed of infection are inversely proportional to the level of diversity.

The feasibility and efficacy of the proposed model has to be verified in real-world scenarios. This paper was definitely well written the best out of all five of the references that I have read. It was very easy to understand, provided great examples, and even a couple of great visual models that made things easier to understand, by being able to see it. This paper has an excellent reference list, with 23 different references to choose from, if you would want to do further investigation.