On the Use of Requirements for Driving Call-for-Tender Processes for Procuring Coarse-grained OTS Components

Because of their complexity, software systems are currently built by integrating components of different nature into hybrid architectures, usually including some third party Off-The-Shelf (OTS) components. Several methods have been proposed to support OTS component selection. Most of them work by comparing requirements, incrementally gained though several iterations, and component descriptions. However, the iterative nature of these methods makes them practically unsuitable in some cases, particularly when conducting call-for-tender-based processes for selecting coarse-grained OTS components. In these cases, company goals need to be thoughtfully and systematically engineered to obtain a well structured set of requirements, which is to remain static during the entire procurement process and cannot be validated through hands-on experimentation. In this paper we report a case study in the selection of an ERP system for a telecommunications company using a call-for-tender process. We present the activities that were undertaken to elicit, analyze and structure the requirements to be included in call-for-tender documents, and the evaluation of components based on the identification of mismatches between requirements and component capabilities.