My Research

The follwing text provides an abstract about my research topic ...

Companies require information systems (IS). Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products provide standardized software solutions. However, despite the fact that there are usually many COTS solutions for almost all types of tasks available on the market, the process of selecting the most suitable one is not an easy task. The process is poorly understood, only insufficiently structured, and performed in an inefficient and ineffective way. This doctoral thesis aims to improve the COTS selection process. By using a service-oriented approach, the functionality of a COTS solution as well as the requirements will be formalized and aligned in a semi-automatic way. This will support the selection process of COTS components that fit business cases in an appropriate way.

Business Requirements are specified in text documents (by a Requirements Engineering process). The functionality of COTS solutions is hidden in source code and database models, but is exposed through graphical user interfaces and manuals. Both are barely formalized and can’t be automatically processed or aligned (cf. (1) Figure 1 ). According to the service-oriented paradigm a COTS solution and a company can be understood as service provider and service consumer, respectively (cf. (2) Figure 1). The provided functionality of the COTS solution can be seen as a service and expressed in terms of service capabilities (cf. (3) Figure 1). The correspondent requirements are the achievable goal and will be expressed in terms of capability goals (cf. (4) Figure 1). Both capability goals and service capabilities can be formalized. Capabilities are expressed in terms of functional and non-functional properties using a specific terminology. Consequently, the formal description of goals and services can be compared by a matching process (cf. (5) Figure 1).

This work is related to semantic Requirements Engineering [7], COTS-aware Requirement Engineering [2, 3, 5, 6, 14], COTS formalization efforts [9, 10, 12, 16] and Semantic Web Service [1, 4, 8, 11, 13, 15]. The central research agenda centers on using service-oriented concepts for solving COTS selection issues. The doctoral thesis will provide two methodologies, one for describing Business Requirements in terms of capability goals and another one for describing COTS component in terms of service capabilities. Further, the matching processes will be examined in detail.

Figure 1: Overall picture

References:

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