State of art and practice of COTS components search engines

COTS-Based Software Development has emerged as an approach aiming to improve a number of drawbacks found in the software development industry. The main idea is the reuse of well-tested software products, known as Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, that will be assembled together in order to develop larger systems. The potential benefits of this approach are mainly its reduced costs and shorter development time, while ensuring the quality. One of the most critical activities in COTS-based development is the identification of the COTS candidates to be integrated into the system under development. Nowadays, the Web is the most used means to find COTS candidates. Thus, the use of search engines turns out to be crucial. This paper deals with existing search engines especially proposed to find COTS components satisfying some needs on the Web. It presents a state of the art and practice of search engines followed by a study assessing to which extent they are able to accomplish their objectives.