Unfriendly COTS Integration-Instrumentation and Interfaces for Improved Plugability. (bibtex)
by Alexander Egyed, Robert Balzer
Abstract:
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. In this paper, we 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 Mathworksâ' 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.
Reference:
Unfriendly COTS Integration-Instrumentation and Interfaces for Improved Plugability. (Alexander Egyed, Robert Balzer), In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2001), Cocoa Beach, Florida, 2001.
Bibtex Entry:
@Conference{DBLP:conf/kbse/EgyedB01,
  author    = {Alexander Egyed and Robert Balzer},
  title     = {Unfriendly COTS Integration-Instrumentation and Interfaces for Improved Plugability.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2001), Cocoa Beach, Florida},
  year      = {2001},
  pages     = {223-231},
  abstract  = {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. In this paper, we 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 Mathworksâ' 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.},
  file      = {:Conferences\\ASE 2001 - Unfriendly COTS Integration - Instrumentation and Interfaces\\Unfriendly COTS Integration - Instrumentation and Interfaces for Improved Plugability-preprint.pdf:PDF},
  keywords  = {},
  url       = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ASE.2001.989808},
}
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