A Review of Negotiation Techniques in Component Based Software Engineering

Building software is an intellectually intensive activity. The processes and tools that have been developed to support custom software development to ensure that the activity is carried out successfully, do not necessarily address some of the key challenges of creating software systems out of COTS components. Primary among these challenges are component selection and integration where competing requirements present the system developer with complex problems unlike those found in custom development. A number of approaches have been proposed for tackling these problems, in many cases borrowing from other disciplines where similar problems have led to the development of sophisticated decision making strategies. We present a review of various proposed approaches in an attempt to identify the relative strengths, and shortcomings, of each before attempting to identify the issues that must be addressed to support component selection