A Stakeholder Negotiation Process for Deriving COTS Evaluation Criteria

Abstract

Summary form only given. Several COTS evaluation processes such as those in (Comella-Dorda et al., 2002) and (Yang and Boehm, 2004) utilize a weighted aggregation (or a similar) method to evaluate COTS products' functional and nonfunctional capabilities. The weighted aggregation method uses O (COTS score * weight of the criteria) to score COTS products relative to each other. However, so far there is little literature that guides users in weighting the evaluation criteria and scoring COTS products on these criteria. In (Boehm and Gruenbacher, 2000) and (Briggs and Grunbacher, 2002) authors have presented a stakeholder-driven process that is used to elicit stakeholder Win conditions, which can then transformed into prioritized requirements (Boehm et al., 1994 and Kitapci et al., 2003). In this poster we present a tailored version of such a stakeholder-driven process that can be applied in the COTS context to define a weighted COTS evaluation criteria as well as a scale for scoring COTS products