Evaluation and Selection COTS Software Process: The State of the Art

In the recent years, the Commercial OffThe-Shelf (COTS) products are being increasingly used in the world of software development. Therefore, evaluating and selecting appropriate COTS product is one of the most critical activities in COTS-based system development. Unfortunately, many methods that have been proposed in previous studies for evaluating and selecting COTS software are still have many limitations and lack to apply and accept as a formal method in the industry. So without an effective method for evaluating and selecting COTS products, the time spent on selecting the suitable COTS software may offset the advantages of using it. This paper outlines and discusses the common problems in existing methods and presents the main processes and evaluation criteria (nonfunctional requirements) that are required for evaluating and selecting COTS software through theoretical and empirical studies which goal is to develop new framework to evaluate and select COTS software.