Observations on versioning of off-the-shelf components in industrial projects (short paper)

Authors:
Reidar Conradi;Jingyue Li
Affiliations:
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway;Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
Venue:
Proceedings of the 12th international workshop on Software configuration management
Year:
2005

Citing 6
Cited 0

Specification, implementation, and deployment of components

Communications of the ACM
COTS-Based Systems Top 10 List

Computer
Eight Lessons Learned during COTS-Based Systems Maintenance

IEEE Software
Overlooked Aspects of COTS-Based Development

IEEE Software
An empirical study of variations in COTS-based software development processes in the Norwegian IT industry

Empirical Software Engineering
An empirical study on off-the-shelf component usage in industrial projects

PROFES'05 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components. We have done a series of interviews and surveys to document and understand industrial practice with OTS-based development in Norwegian, German, and Italian IT industry. The perspective is that of a software architect or system integrator, not a developer or maintainer of such components. The study object is a completed development project using one or several OTS components. This paper reports on the versioning aspects of OTS components in such projects. We found that one third of the COTS components actually provided source code, in addition to all OSS components. However, OTS components were seldom modified (i.e. re-used "as-is"), even if source code was available. Although backward compatibility of new releases did not cause noticeable problems for a single OTS component, using several different OTS components in a project caused difficulties in maintenance planning of asynchronous releases and system integration of new releases. Several new research questions have been formulated based on the results of this study.