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Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
16th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'01)
p. 223
Unfriendly COTS Integration-Instrumentation and Interfaces for Improved Plugability
Alexander Egyed, Teknowledge Corporation
Robert Balzer, Teknowledge Corporation
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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ASE.2001.989808
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| Abstract |
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It is becoming increasingly desirable to incorporate
Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) tools as software
components into larger software systems. Due to their
large user base, COTS tools tend to be cheap, reasonably
reliable, and functionally powerful. Reusing them as
components has the benefit of significantly reducing
development cost and effort.
Despite these advantages, developers encounter major
obstacles in integrating most COTS tools because these
tools have been constructed as stand-alone applications
and make assumptions about their environment that do
not hold when used as part of larger software systems.
Most significantly, while they frequently contain
programmatic interfaces that allow other components to
obtain services from them on a direct call basis, they
almost always lack the notification and data synchronicity
facilities required for active integration.
In this paper, we present an integration framework for
adding these notification and data synchronization
facilities to COTS tools so that they can be integrated as
active software components into larger systems. We
illustrate our integration framework through tool suites
we constructed around Mathworks’ Matlab/Stateflow and
Rational’s Rose (two widely-used, large COTS tools). Our
experience to date is that it is indeed possible to
transform standalone COTS tools into software
components.
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 Additional Information
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Citation:
Alexander Egyed, Robert Balzer,
"Unfriendly COTS Integration-Instrumentation and Interfaces for Improved Plugability,"
ase,
p. 223,
16th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'01),
2001
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