Requirements engineering for COTS based systems

In spite of the increasing use of COTS products for system development, there is little consideration on how to acquire requirements for COTS products, how to select COTS components and how to assemble them to comply to these requirements. The paper addresses the issue of the requirements engineering process for COTS components acquisition and assembly. It proposes an approach based on the notion of requirements maps and assembly strategies and demonstrates the approach with the selection of a CASE tool.