Early detection of COTS component functional suitability

The adoption of COTS-based development brings with it many challenges about the identification and finding of candidate components for reuse. Particularly, the first stage in the identification of COTS candidates is commonly carried out by dealing with unstructured information on the Web, which makes the evaluation process highly costly when applying complex evaluation criteria. To facilitate this process, our proposal introduces an early measurement procedure for suitability of COTS candidates. Considering that filtering is about a first-stage selection, functionality evaluation might drive the analysis, proceeding with the evaluation of other properties only on the pre-selected candidates. In this way, a few candidates are fully evaluated making in principle the whole process more cost-effective. In this paper, we illustrate how functional measures at an initial state are calculated for an E-payment case study.