Quality Attributes for COTS Components

As Component-based Software Development (CBSD) starts to be effectively used, some software vendors have commenced to successfully sell and licence commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components. One of the most critical processes in CBSD is the selection of the COTS components that meet the user’s requirements. Current proposals have shown how to deal with the functional aspects of this evaluation process. However, there is a lack of appropriate quality models that allow an effective assessment of COTS components. Besides, the international standards that address the software products’ quality issues (in particular, those from ISO and IEEE) have shown to be too general for dealing with the specific characteristics of software components. In this paper we propose a quality model for CBSD based on ISO 9126, that defines a set of quality attributes and their associated metrics for the effective evaluation of COTS components.