Unfriendly COTS integration - instrumentation and interfaces for improved plugability

It is becoming increasingly desirable to incorporate commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) tools as software components into larger software systems. Due to their large user base, COTS tools tend to be cheap, reasonably reliable, and functionally powerful. Reusing them as components has the benefit of significantly reducing development cost and effort. Despite these advantages, developers encounter major obstacles in integrating most COTS tools because these tools have been constructed as stand-alone applications and make assumptions about their environment that do not hold when used as part of larger software systems. Most significantly, while they frequently contain programmatic interfaces that allow other components to obtain services from them on a direct call basis, they almost always lack the notification and data synchronicity facilities required for active integration. The authors present an integration framework for adding these notification and data synchronization facilities to COTS tools so that they can be integrated as active software components into larger systems. We illustrate our integration framework through tool suites we constructed around Mathworks' Matlab/Stateflow and Rational's Rose (two widely-used, large COTS tools). Our experience to date is that it is indeed possible to transform standalone COTS tools into software components.