Acquiring COTS software selection requirements

Commercial off the shelf software can save development time and money if you can find a package that meets your customer's needs. The authors propose a model for matching COTS product features with user requirements. To support requirements acquisition for selecting commercial off the shelf products, we propose a method we used recently for selecting a complex COTS software system that had to comply with over 130 customer requirements. The lessons we learned from that experience refined our design of PORE (procurement oriented requirements engineering), a template based method for requirements acquisition. We report 11 of these lessons, with particular focus on the typical problems that arose and solutions to avoid them in the future. These solutions, we believe, extend state of the art requirements acquisition techniques to the component based software engineering process.