Establishing Trust in COTS Components

Increased use of COTS software components means increased demand for trust in these artifacts. The problem lies in the fact that trust is mainly a philosophical concept. We all deal with trust issues in our daily life yet it is hard for us to identify the attributes of trust. In the context of software components certain aspects and features can be classified as trust attributes. In this paper we attempt to identify these attributes and describe a mechanism to effectively use these in the selection and integration of COTS components. We also emphasize the important connection between the production and procurement processes and discuss how it can help us establish better trust in software components.