COTS Components in Software Development Are Not Without Effort or Risk
I have lost count of how many project that used COTS (commercial off the shelf software) components thinking they were saving huge development expense where the COTS itself was the cause of project failure.
I recall, some time ago when a super object oriented database was going to save the day, cutting development cost dramatically and exceeding requirements. Only problem is that software didn’t work. And the developer didn’t have source to fix it. And the design was wrong. And On and on.
In a less dramatic sense I look at the seemingly risk free use of COTS components of a small magnitude. For example we used a package that was an excel like plug-in one time for our custom calcs. The vendor went out of business and we lost support. We had to redevelop (this time we used real Excel) but it cost months of development work, and changes to user configurations, and technical support challenges.
And people often forget about testing of the COTS components. They will impact test effort (if you assume they just work you are likely  in for a sifnificant project surprise)
Then there is the IT support of a deployed system. Your users dont care if the software is COTS, not developed by you. They want support for the system with its whole mission.
And just the cost of choosing the right (hopefully) COTS software. SEER for Software captures all these costs and risks.
Northrop published a case study showing of SEER-SEM and its COTS abilities: Â ”the results were remarkable”
SEER for Software’s COTS functionality provides estimates of the effort to choose, use, and deploy COTS software.
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