Guiding parallel requirements acquisition and COTS software selection

This paper proposes a new process to address the lack of guidance for acquiring requirements to enable evaluation of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software. The process is part goal-driven and part context-driven, in that it exploits models of the candidate COTS software as well as process goals to guide a requirements engineering team. The paper demonstrates the approach with selection of a commercial electronic mail system. It also describes a prototype software tool currently under development, and outlines future research directions to extend and evaluate the approach.