The Ruthless Pursuit of the Truth about COTS

Abstract

We expose some of the truths about COTS, discounting some exaggerated claims about the applicability of COTS, particularly with regard to using COTS in safety critical systems. Although we agree that COTS has great potential for reduced development and maintenance time and cost, we feel that the advocates of COTS have not adequately addressed some critical issues concerning reliability, maintainability, availability, requirements risk analysis, and cost. Thus we illuminate these issues, suggesting solutions in cases where solutions are feasible and leaving some questions unanswered because it appears that the questions cannot be answered due to the inherent limitations of COTS. These limitations are present because there is inadequate visibility and documentation of COTS components.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADP010675

Entities

People

  • Norman F. Schneidewind

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Business Administration
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Engineering
  • Jet Propulsion
  • Maintainability
  • Maintenance
  • Maintenance Costs
  • Manpower
  • Mobile Phones
  • Reliability
  • Risk
  • Risk Analysis
  • Risk Factors
  • Risk Management
  • Software Development

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Software Engineering.