what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
to it in and work in the new system. Reducing development time and resources
and lowering maintenance costs are just a few ways that commercial-off-the-shelf
based software development can drastically help a developing country today. he
information technology support for such a country is able to be jump-started by
this kind of development process very easily and quickly.
To this end, some research has been done on a framework called STACE that
is described as a “generic sociotechnical framework for COTS software evalua-
tion and selection” [6]. his research is aimed at helping potential programmers
and developers who participate in collaborative software design truly examine the
relationships between separate elements and components of the overall design. his
packaged framework also helps the users to see the impact that their decisions
in the commercial-off-the-shelf selection process will have on the final software
evaluation. his framework helps users to successfully implement and plan their
commercial-off-the-shelf based software systems.
Commercial-off-the-shelf based software development, also referred to as
component-based software engineering, might be better defined as the methodical
selection and integration of reusable software into a larger software package. To
truly understand how this type of system could work and be beneficial to engineers,
programmers, and developers worldwide, one must be able to see that many parts
of software systems are redundant or appear commonly throughout the collab-
orative software development world. hese components that appear over and over
again throughout software components should be able to be written and composed
only once, and then used over and over again, effectively recycling the code in an
extremely efficient way.
hough there are many similarities between commercial-off-the-shelf based
software development and component-based software engineering, there are many
differences as well. In Figure 15.11, we have a table that can show the major differ-
ences between the two types of collaborative software development. As can be seen
in Figure 15.11, the main differences in CBSE design and CBS design all come back
to the fact that CBS design must at least partially comprise COTS components,
where CBSE design does not have that requirement.
From Figure 15.11, a number of similarities, as well as differences, in Component-
Based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Commercial-off-the-shelf Based System
Design (CBS) can be seen. he irst diference that can be seen is in the irst column
of the table. When dealing with the number of components in a software system,
CBSE and CBS differ, but only slightly. Both of these design theories use the idea
that multiple components can be a part of a larger software system. his means
that any given software package should be able to be broken down into smaller
subsections, or components, that perform smaller tasks inside the larger function-
ing of the system. However, CBS design promotes the idea that if the function of
the overall system as a whole is on a small enough scale, then the software system
can be scaled down to only include one component. In other words, it is unneces-
sary for a software system to be designed to be more complex than it needs to be.
