COTS Products in the Defense Industry

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COTS Products in theDefense Industry

• Amit Shah
• S07-35

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Overview

• Project Generalizations
• Selection Methodology
• Integration
• Post Development Methodology
• Ensuring Reliability
• Questions

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Project Generalizations

• Large projects
• LOC, Cost, Man-hours
• Sell low quantity.
• Reliability is very important!
• Upgrades/Updates are few if any after deployment.

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COTS Product Selection Methodology

• Extremely important to choose right COTS products
  in early stages of the development.
• Changes made at later stages will be very costly.
• Spending time and money early on to properly
  research all potential COTS products will be
  worth the cost at later stages.
• Methods of Comparison
• Benchmark Comparisons.
• Reliability measured through historical data.
• Best fit in terms of functional requirements.
• Technical Reports, Internal Research, Industry
  Reports/Research

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Constraints

• Technical Constraints
• Very important that the product meet to the
  specifications of the overall system
  requirements.
• Speed, Reliability, Consistency
• Strategic Constraint
• Must be approved by the companys procurement
  department, customer, systems engineers, and the
  software engineering team.
• Economic Constraint
• Usually the cost of the COTS product is a small
  portion of the overall cost of the system. Cost
  does play a role in the decision, but the COTS
  functionality and reliability will be weighted
  higher.

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Integration

• Testing of Glue Code
• Unit testing
• Testing for performance
• Testing for reliability
• Fully Integrated System Testing
• Testing for performance
• Testing for reliability

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Integration Problems

• Handling Failures/Performance Issues
• Product configurations tweaked
• Use vendor support
• Tweak glue code
• Use wrappers around COTS product
• Ensure only correct values go into and out of
  COTS product.

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Post Deployment

• Updates to COTS product usually not applied to a
  deployed product.
• System should be very deterministic.
• New features and other upgrades could require
  updates of COTS product.

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Ensuring Reliability

• Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy,...
• Software fault tolerant application
• N-Version programming
• Majority Voting
• Replication

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References

• COTS Based Systems http//greenbay.usc.edu/csci57
  7/fall2006/site/coursenotes/ec/charts/ec-05.ppt
• DOD Information Analysis Center
  http//www.dacs.dtic.mil/techs/cots/toc.shtml
• National Defense Industrial Association
  http//www.ndia.org/Content/ContentGroups/Division
  s1/Systems_Engineering/NDIATopSWIssues0620Report.
  pdf

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Questions?