Towards a COTS-based development environment

Systems' developing using COTS components is very attractive since it promises costs and risks reduction as well as higher software quality. The process of such reuse development approach consists in examining the marketplace to identify potential COTS components, evaluate them to select the most appropriate one, adapt it to the needs and integrate it in the system. This process seems to be simple but it is not obvious in practice. In fact, the developer faces many problems like where to find potential COTS components, which is the most suitable selection/integration method to the current project and developer profile, how to choose it and how to apply it. The lack of guidance during the COTS-based development (CBD) process is conspicuous and the need of a CBD environment helping the developer in the different process steps is essential. Existing environments either don't support the specific CBD process or support only one step. In this paper, we propose an environment denoted "WagehCom" that lets the developer: (i) build a customized process fitted with his/her profile and project requirements, (ii) get a strategic guidance for selection and/or integration methods choice, and (iii) get a tactic guidance to apply the advocated methods.