Software Engineering Institute

This monograph provides an in-depth technical study about a COTS-based information system made up of several commercial components. In particular, this monograph provides details of the activities needed to make the system functionally useful. While all readers may find value in this report, it is expressly aimed at a technical audience.

The organization that performed the work described in this monograph is not named, nor are the specific commercial products. All of them, however, are common products, and the work is very typical of the type of effort entailed in integrating and tuning a COTS-based information system.

Adequately describing the conceptual foundation of this work would consume too much space, given the intended scope of a single monograph; we have therefore provided only a brief overview here. A full description of the high-level concepts related to debugging COTS-based systems can be found in a monograph devoted to overall debugging issues for COTS components, Isolating Faults in Complex COTS-Based Systems.