Meeting the Challenges of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Products: The Information Technology Solutions Evolution Process (ITSEP)

Government and private organizations are escalating their use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products in critical business systems. These organizations find that the traditional development approach rarely works; that is, the process of defining requirements, formulating an architecture, and then trying to find COTS products to meet the specified requirements within the defined architecture. We describe an alternative approach, based on the Rational Unified Process? (RUP), that modifies the acquisition and development processes to more effectively leverage the COTS marketplace through concurrent discovery and negotiation of user needs and business processes, applicable COTS technology and products, the target architecture, and programmatic constraints.