An Approach to Certifying Off-the-Shelf Software Components

When a software system fails a confusing and complex liability problem ensues for all parties that have contributed software functionality to the system This paper presents a customer based methodology for predicting what impact on system reliability O the Shelf software components will have if they were to fail Thus this paper describes methods for assessing the likelihood that someone else s defective software components will negatively impact your sys tem s quality Our methods can be applied before the components are adopted and without requiring component vendors to provide proprietary information about their development process This provides the luxury to take appropriate defensive steps against O The Shelf component failures before it is too late