Dynamic Model for COTS Glue Code Development and COTS Integration

One of the most significant changes in the software development area is the trend of building systems incorporating pre-existing software, with special emphasis upon the use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software components. COTS describes software commercially available as stand-alone products and which offer specific functionality needed by a larger system into which they might be incorporated. The purpose of using COTS is to lower overall development costs with involving less development time by taking advantage of existing, market-proven, and vendor supported products. But we have no control over the functionality, performance, and evolution of COTS products since their Black-Box nature. Besides, most COTS products are not designed to interoperate with each other and most COTS vendors do not support glue code (sometimes called glueware and binding code). So, most software development teams that use COTS components have difficulties in estimating effort and schedule for COTS glue code development and integration of them into application systems.