We have recently finished a highly successful Affiliates Focused Workshop on COTS Integration. The workshop identified a number of significant project strategies for current COTS integration, and a number of research opportunities for developing future technology to better assess and reduce COTS integration costs and risks.
The workshop also identified a number of significant COTS integration issues that are important to understand and address at the executive level. Those include:
· Integration of COTS considerations and corporate strategies. Using COTS software is an attractive strategy for "10X" -type initiatives to reduce software cost and cycle time by factors of 10, but they need to deal with the facts that software maintenance costs frequently increase due to COTS volatility, and that COTS-grade quality and volatility may conflict with concurrent "six sigma" -type initiatives to radically reduce software defect rates.· Effects of COTS considerations on corporate software processes. Traditional software processes involve top-down, requirements-to-capabilities, waterfall-type models. COTS - intensive processes tend more to involve bottom-up, capabilities-to-requirements, spiral-type models, with a strong emphasis on prototyping, risk management, and emerging best practices such as architecture review boards.
· Corporate strategies for dealing with COTS vendors. How does one best balance long-term vendor strategic alliances with architecting for COTS substitutability? How do strategies vary in dealing with small, medium, and very large-size COTS vendors?
· Assessing emerging technology and standards. How effective are wrappers, mediators, instrumented connectors, and glue-code generators in dealing with COTS incompatibilities? What COTS integration problems are and are not solved with such interface standards as CORBA and OCE? How effective are emerging models for analyzing COTS integration cost, risk, and performance?
Below is the preliminary agenda for addressing these issues. It begins with an overview session, followed by three Affiliate executive panel sessions on COTS considerations in commercial organizations, in government contracting, and in emerging technology.
(Some panelists are unconfirmed)
7:30-8:15 Continental Breakfast8:15-10-00 Overview and Context Welcome Leonard Silverman, Dean of Engineering, USC Keynote Emmett Paige, Jr., ASD/C3I Overview of Issues Barry Boehm, USC COTS Integration and Systems Architecting Eb Rechtin, USC
10:00-10:30 Break
10:30-12:00 Panel: COTS Considerations in Commercial Organizations Larry Bernstein, Price Waterhouse, Chair Confirmed Panelists include: Wayne Hunt (Lucent Bell Labs), Tony Wasserman (recently IDE), Marie Silverthorn (Texas Instruments), Mike Sweeney (EDS),Dave Kurshan (NPI), and Jerry Roberto (Bellcore)
12:00-1:00 Lunch
1:00-2:30 Panel: COTS Considerations in Government Contracting Walt Scacchi, USC School of Business Administration, Chair Confirmed Panelists include: Gary Kang (TRW), Terry Snyder (Hughes) and Rami Razouk (Aerospace)
2:30-3:00 Break
3:00-4:30 Panel: COTS Integration and Emerging Technology Bob Balzer, USC-ISI, Chair Confirmed Panelists include: Steve Cross (SEI), Erik Mettala (MCC), Art Pyster (recently SPC, soon FAA), John Salasin (DARPA)