A Contextualized Study of COTS-Based E-Service Projects

Abstract

Properly recording the context factors of empirical results is essential for comparison and integration of results from different studies and for assessing the relevance of a given result to one’s own environment. COTS-based application (CBA) developers need both empirical data and context data for choosing among current and newlyemerging candidate technologies based on solid evidence that they will work cost effectively under the conditions of their particular projects. Previous empirical research on COTS-based development (CBD) has produced various insights on the critical success factors of CBD. Such accumulations also produce various experience/knowledge bases on which the contextualized longitudinal analysis of CBA can be performed. This poster presents an initial contextualized longitudinal analysis of CBA’s by identifying a set of project context factors as contextualizing meta-data which represent the characteristics of the project, process, product, and personnel perspectives of the system being developed. It provides comparative contextualization analysis among different CBA types, and also presents a comparison of two CBA’s from different domains, and then shows how the different contexts lead to different CBA process, products, and economic decisions.