A Service-Oriented Blueprint for COTS Integration: the Hidden Part of the Iceberg

The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software can greatly reduce the development cost and effort for complex software systems. Reusing software can also improve the general quality of a system by leveraging already proven implementations. One of the limiting factors in the adoption of COTS software is the complexity of integrating it with the rest of the system under development. Often, requirements do not entirely match the functionalities available in COTS components, increasing the complexity of the glue software that needs to be written. In this paper, we present the blueprint of a service-oriented architecture that can guide the engineer both in specifying the functionalities of a complex software system and as a deployment architecture to seamlessly integrate COTS components implementing such functionalities. The COTS integration concern, typically a deployment issue, is addressed in the service architecture, and is treated as first-class citizen of the development process.