Reconciling Agility and Discipline in COTS Selection Processes

Abstract

Currently, information systems are mainly built by integrating or customizing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components acquired or licensed from the marketplace. The processes necessary to steer a suitable acquisition are different from traditional software development processes. Among them, we are interested in the process of selection of COTS components. COTS selection requires discipline to coordinate the selection team and the set of new activities that are necessary to support a successful selection. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) contains important guidelines for process improvement, and specifies "what" we must have into account to achieve the disciplined processes (among others things). On the other hand, agile methods are playing nowadays an important role in software engineering practices, because they are specifying "how" the software practices must be addressed to attain agility and improvement in the software processes. The contribution of this work is to propose a framework to reconcile agile and discipline-based approaches in the COTS selection domain, by including agile practices into the 5 levels of CMMI for COTS acquisition