Industrial development of software systems needs to be guided by recognized engineering principles. Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components enable the systematic and cost-effective reuse of prefabricated tested parts, a characteristic approach of mature engineering disciplines. This reuse necessitates a thorough test of these components to make sure that each works as specified in a real context. Beydeda and Gruhn invited leading researchers in the area of component testing to contribute to this monograph, which covers all related aspects from testing components in a context-independent manner through testing components in the context of a specific system to testing complete systems built from different components. The authors take the viewpoints of both component developers and component users, and their contributions encompass functional requirements such as correctness and functionality compliance as well as non-functional requirements like performance and robustness. Overall this monograph offers researchers, graduate students and advanced professionals a unique and comprehensive overview of the state of the art in testing COTS components and COTS-based systems.

This title looks at strategies for reducing IT costs and improving quality, including open systems and off-the-shelf software. It explains the advantages, risks, and management implications of IT strategies based on these approaches.

The theme “Build and Conquer” chosen for this year’s conference fully represents what we (the organizers) want to put across to the software community: software development is an engineering discipline, and not an artistic expression. Once we are ready to “build” our software systems using pieces previously builtin (similar to any other technology manufacturer), we will be able to “conquer” the software engineering process. If we take a look at other engineering disciplines such as car manufacturing, house appliances or aeronautics, we see that the final products are built through the integration of multiprovider commercial components. These components are successfully integrated and constitute an important part of the final product. Most software-related organizations still build software from scratch, omitting thousands of ready-built commercially available software components that could be used very effectively during the development phase. This year ICCBSS moves to Europe for the first time since the first conference took place in Orlando, FL, USA in 2002. The conference scope has enlarged over the years to include the Open Source community and Web Services technologies. The reason for this is that I believe both are considered components-off-the-shelf, so many of the characteristics of COTS are also applied to Open Source and Web Services. Due to this, we will enjoy the presence of keynote speakers and researchers presenting on these two topics for the first time.

Modernsoftwaresystemsincreasinglyusecommercial-o?-the-shelf(COTS)so- ware products as building blocks. In some cases, major software systems are assembled with virtually no custom code in the system. The use of COTS software products as components o?ers the promise of rapid delivery to end users, shared development costs with other customers, and an opportunity for expanding mission or business capabilities and performance as improvements are made in the commercial marketplace. Few organizations today can a?ord the resources and time to replicate market-tested capabilities. Yet, the promise of COTS products is too often not realized in practice. There have been more failures than successes in using COTS software products. The research and software practitioner communities have been working with COTS-based software systems for a number of years. There is now su?cient documented experience in the community to collect, analyze, and disseminate success stories, common failings, lessons-learned, and research advances. The mounting experience shows that the e?ective use of COTS software products in major software systems demands new skills, knowledge, and abilities, changed roles and responsibilities, and di?erent techniques and processes. The International Conference on COTS-Based Software Systems (ICCBSS) focuses on the challenges of building and maintaining systems that incorporate COTSsoftwareproducts.Theconferencesponsors,theNationalResearchCo- cil Canada, the Software Engineering Institute, and the University of Southern California Center for Software Engineering, aim to bring together managers, - velopers, maintainers, and researchers to share their expertise and experience.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on COTS-Based Software Systems, ICCBSS 2003, held in Ottawa, Canada in February 2003. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address all current issues on commcerial-off-the-shelf-systems, from the point of view of research and development as well as from the practitioner's application point of view.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on COTS-Based Software Systems, ICCBSS 2004, held in Redondo Beach, CA, USA, in February 2004. The 27 revised papers presented together with summaries of workshops, panels, and tutorials were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. The papers address all current issues on commercial-off-the-shelf based software systems, from the point of view of research and development as well as from the practitioner's point of view and spanning the entire software life cycle.

As software systems become ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more critical. Given that solutions to these issues must be taken into account from the very beginning of the design process, it is appropriate that dependability is addressed at the architectural level. This book results from an effort to bring together the research communities of software architectures and dependability. Inspired by the ICSE 2003 Workshop on Software Architectures for Dependable Systems, the book focuses on topics relevant to improving the state of the art in architecting dependable systems. The 15 thoroughly reviewed papers originate partly from the workshop; others were solicited in order to achieve complete coverage of all relevant aspects. The papers are organized into topical sections on architectures for dependability, fault-tolerance in software architectures, dependability analysis in software architectures, and industrial experience.