Name:
                    Student:    Vijay Sai (Vijay Sai Vadlamudi)
                                    Prin. Software Engineer & Business Analyst,
                                    SEI , Carnegie Mellon

                    Mentor:    Patricia Oberndorf
                                    Director, Dynamic Systems Program
                                    SEI, Carnegie Mellon

                   Advisor:    Dave Root

Purpose
 

     this work is the result of the joint effort of Dr.Neil Maiden, City University, London, Dr.Xavier Fracnh,
     University of Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain and myself
     the original paper's title is not used here;
     the text below is directly extracted from the paper and where appropriate has been changed to fit the
     the needs of this declaration sought by the School

Research paper: To reason out COTS (Commercial-off-the-Shelf) software component selection through
Actor-Oriented Models and Use Cases

                   Abstract.  This paper reports results from a retrospective application of the
                                    REACT (REquirements ArChiTecture) approach to COTS selection for a real-world
financial planning, forecasting
                                    and budgeting application. Starting from existing use cases, we have derived
                                    some actor-oriented models for representing the architecture of the system
                                   at two different levels of detail. Then, we have investigated which combination
                                    of components may be plugged into the system as instances of model actors.
                                    We have applied some assessing methods and techniques to evaluate the resulting
                                    architectures and the behaviour of the components therein. As a result, we
                                    may say that REACT has demonstrated its exploitability in a real case study.

Results:  This paper reports results from a retrospective application of REACT to aid the se-lection of
components for a real-world financial planning, forecasting and budgeting application. The authors applied
REACT to select between 3 candidate architectures, each of which involved three or more individual
off-the-shelf components and cus-tom-built modules. The application of the methodology was a success. The
team was able to apply the REACT process, develop its models and undertake its analyses. i* modelling was
effective for modelling the architecture of both the socio-technical and software systems. REACT heuristics
were applied to explore the architecture- and component-level properties of the candidate solutions. The
results allow us to answer the 3 research questions:

    (i) Can REACT be applied successfully to a real-world component selection problem?
    (ii) What are the potential benefits that REACT can offer to decision-makers?
    (iii)What new problems must REACT overcome to be useful and usable in decision-making?

To conclude, this paper reports a first evaluation of REACT. We are currently seeking new challenges, in
particular to evaluate the method by using it during other medium- and large-scale system development
projects.