Estimating COTS Integration: An Analytical Approach

We present an experiment whose purpose is to deene an analytical approach to the prediction of integration costs for COTS products. Our approach consists in deening the speciication of the COTS product as well as the speciication of the context in which we plan to use it by means of formal (relational) speciications, and assessing integration costs by estimating the functional distance between the two speciications. The purpose of our experiment is to identify which deenition of functional distance (among many possible candidates) is best adapted to predict integration costs.