The Role of Standards in COTS Integration Projects

Abstract

We have long used standards to guide the development process of software systems. Standards such as POSIX, X-Windows, SQL have become part of the language of software developers and have guided the coding of systems that are intended to be portable and interoperable. Standards also have a role to play in the integration of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we have been participating on the Renaissance Team, a reengineering effort that has seen the focus shift from custom-built systems to the use of COTS to satisfy prime mission functions. As part of this effort, we developed a process that identified standards that are applicable to the evaluation and integration of products and assessed how those standards should be applied. Since the goal is to develop a set of standards that can be used to instantiate systems of differing sizes and capabilities, the standards selected have been broken into four areas: global integration standards, global development standards, mission development standards, and mission integration standards. Each of the areas is less restrictive than the preceding area in the standards that are allowed. This paper describes the process that we used to select and categorize the standards to be applied to Renaissance systems.