FACTORS INFLUENCING A DECISION TO INCORPORATE COTS

Factors Influencing A Decision To Incorporate Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS), Components In A Project



Factors Influencing A Decision To Incorporate Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS), Components In A Project

Introduction

Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) or simply off the shelf (OTS) is a term for software or hardware, generally technology or computer products, that are ready-made and available for sale, lease, or license to the general public. They are often used as alternatives to in-house developments or one-off government-funded developments. (Basili, 1984) The use of COTS is being mandated across many government and business programs, as they may offer significant savings in procurement and maintenance. However, since COTS software specifications are written by external sources, government agencies are sometimes wary of these products because they fear that future changes to the product will not be under their control. More than a dozen years ago when then U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry issued his famous memo declaring that commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology be used whenever possible, the difference between COTS and custom was much more clear than today. COTS referred to products with part numbers bought off the shelf at commercial prices, whereas custom was designed to military specifications from the ground up with a much higher price tag. The intent of COTS was to eliminate excessive spending that brought about those infamous $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers. (Silver Spring, 1994)

Factors Influencing A Decision To Incorporate Commercial Off The Shelf

Today many COTS vendors say that their customers typically choose a product from a parts list and ask for it to be tweaked for their specific application. This is where the term custom off-the-shelf is coming from. Another way to describe it would be value-added COTS.

Many systems integrators today do not want to spend time programming or ruggedizing boards, so they shift that responsibility onto the suppliers. This is one of the reasons so many hardware companies have a large supply of software engineers-they are writing application code for customers. (Kontio, 1996)

Motivations for using COTS components include reduction of overall system development and costs (as components can be bought or licensed instead of being developed from scratch) and reduced maintenance costs. In software development, many considered COTS to be the silver bullet during the 1990s, but COTS development came with many not-so-obvious tradeoffs—overall cost and development time can definitely be reduced, but often at the expense of an increase in software component integration work and a dependency on a third-party component vendor. (Basili, 1994)

Over the past decade, the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to implement significant portions of a software system has grown in both government and industry. The use of COTS products emphasizes buying commercial capabilities rather than building unique ones. Organizations that adopt a COTS-based systems approach generally expect either more rapid or less costly system construction. These organizations also hope to stay in step with the advances in technology that occur in the competitive marketplace. Government organizations are particularly encouraged to use COTS ...