The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post

Software Engineering Laboratory Series: Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Software Engineering Workshop

The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by NASA/GSFC and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of application software. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document

Metrics and Models for Cost and Quality of Component-Based Software

Quality and risk concerns currently limit the application of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software components to non-critical applications. Software metrics can quantify factors contributing to the overall quality of a component-based system, and models for tradeoffs between cost and various aspects of quality can guide quality and risk management by identifying and eliminating sources of risk. This paper discusses metrics and models that can be used to alleviate quality concerns for COTS-based systems, enabling the use of COTS components in a broader range of applications

Generalization of an integrated cost model and extensions to COTS, PLE and TTM

There have been existing software reuse cost models related to estimating costs of software reuse, for example, COCOMO II, COCOTS, and so on. Chmiel\u27s model [Chmiel 2000] is a generalization of these cost models. This model is different from others in that the decisions are composed of four levels and treats reuse projects from a point of view of long term run. Each level corresponds one engineering cycle. Each level is a decision making process based on calculation of NPV, ROI, and other economic indices. Reuse investment decisions are made on different levels from the corporate to the programming.;Chmiel\u27s model doesn\u27t cover Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS), Product Line Engineering (PLE) and benefits due to shortened Time-To-Market (TTM) and can only deal with internal traffic since the model assumes all of the reusable components are built from scratch in house. For example, Extra efforts caused by the use of COTS, assessment, tailoring, glue code and COTS volatility, are not covered in this model. And this model doesn\u27t treat the benefits of TTM, for example, business performance.;By extending Chmiel\u27s model, the new model is applied to CBSE (Component-Based Software Engineering), COTS reuse systems and PLE. In addition, attempts of quantifying benefits of shortened TTM are made within this study and a TTM submodel is developed to cover this issue.;This study also addresses the issue to analyze and optimize corporate Return On Investment (ROI). The rational is that optimizing (maximizing) the corporate ROI under the condition that all other ROI\u27s are positive. By designing an algorithm and applying it to the data, this study discovers the method how to make the maximized value of corporate ROI.;And this model is supported through a tool based on the model rationale. Users to this tool are corporate management and development engineers. The supporting tool has user-friendly interface and allows users to input values of related parameters. A detailed report is produced, which is composed of details about costs and benefits, final Net Present Value (NPV) and ROI of each cycle

A Graph-Based Model for Component-Based Software Development

Software metrics can be used to objectively quantify the quality of software components and systems, alleviating quality and risk concerns and raising assurance in component-based systems. In this paper, we present a graph-based model for component-based software development. We assume that a number of components have been characterized in terms of non-functional metrics of importance to the software system being developed, and that the interfaces connecting various components have been similarly characterized. The emphasis of this work is on cost and quality of the system under development, and reaching an acceptable compromise between the two

System requirements-OSS components: matching and mismatch resolution practices – an empirical study

Developing systems by integrating Open Source Software (OSS) is increasingly gaining importance in the software industry. Although the literature claims that this approach highly impacts Requirements Engineering (RE) practices, there is a lack of empirical evidence to demonstrate this statement. To explore and understand problems and challenges of current system requirement–OSS component matching and mismatches resolution practices in software development projects that integrate one or more OSS components into their software products. Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 25 respondents that have performed RE activities in software development projects that integrate OSS components in 25 different software development companies in Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study uncovers 15 observations regarding system requirements-OSS components matching and mismatch resolution practices used in industrial projects that integrate OSS components. The assessed projects focused mainly on pre-release stages of software applications that integrate OSS components in an opportunistic way. The results also provide details of a set of previously unexplored scenarios when solving system requirement–OSS component mismatches; and clarify some challenges and related problems. For instance, although licensing issues and the potential changes in OSS components by their corresponding communities and/or changes in system requirements have been greatly discussed in the RE literature as problems for OSS component integration, they did not appear to be relevant in our assessed projects. Instead, practitioners highlighted the problem of getting suitable OSS component documentation/information.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Engineering Automation for Reliable Software Interim Progress Report (10/01/2000 - 09/30/2001)

Prepared for: U.S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2211The objective of our effort is to develop a scientific basis for producing reliable software that is also flexible and cost effective for the DoD distributed software domain. This objective addresses the long term goals of increasing the quality of service provided by complex systems while reducing development risks, costs, and time. Our work focuses on "wrap and glue" technology based on a domain specific distributed prototype model. The key to making the proposed approach reliable, flexible, and cost-effective is the automatic generation of glue and wrappers based on a designer's specification. The "wrap and glue" approach allows system designers to concentrate on the difficult interoperability problems and defines solutions in terms of deeper and more difficult interoperability issues, while freeing designers from implementation details. Specific research areas for the proposed effort include technology enabling rapid prototyping, inference for design checking, automatic program generation, distributed real-time scheduling, wrapper and glue technology, and reliability assessment and improvement. The proposed technology will be integrated with past research results to enable a quantum leap forward in the state of the art for rapid prototyping.U. S. Army Research Office P.O. Box 12211 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-22110473-MA-SPApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited