A framework for intelligent assessment and resolution of commercial-off-the-shelf product incompatibilities

Software systems today are frequently composed from prefabricated commercial components that provide complex functionality and engage in complicated interactions. Such projects that utilize multiple commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) products often confront interoperability conflicts resulting in budget and schedule overruns. These conflicts occur because of the incompatible assumptions made by developers during the development of these products. Identification of such conflicts and planning strategies to resolve them is critical for developing such systems under budget and schedule constraints. Unfortunately, acquiring information to perform interoperability analysis is a time-intensive process. Moreover, increase in the number of COTS products available to fulfill similar functionality leads to hundreds of COTS product combinations, further complicating the COTS interoperability assessment activity. This dissertation motivates, presents and validates an intelligent assessment and resolution framework for Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) incompatibilities. The framework can be used to perform high-level and automated interoperability assessment to filter out COTS product combinations whose integration will not be feasible within project constraints. The framework efficiently and effectively captures knowledge on COTS product interoperability and allows a user to automatically leverage this knowledge to perform interoperability assessment. The framework elements have been utilized to develop an interoperability assessment tool–Integration Studio. This framework is empirically validated using controlled experiments and project implementations in 25 projects from small, medium and large network centric systems from diverse business domains. The empirical evidence consistently indicates an increase in interoperability assessment productivity by about 50% and accuracy by 20% in small and medium systems.