COTS integration and evaluation: introduction

1 BACKGROUND Enterprise systems, as well as other types of software systems, are increasingly being developed largely from COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) components. While a COTS-based systems approach is often considered essential to building highly functional, competitive systems this approach also poses many challenges. Foremost among these is the identification of compatible components that meet the functional requirements of the system under development. Compatibility in this sense is a measure of how easily various components can be integrated. A COBOL module running on a Unisys platform would not be considered highly compatible with a VisualBasic application, for example.