Lymer, Liu and Easterbrook published Experience in Using Business Scenarios to Assess COTS Components in Integrated Solutions
The use a Scenario Framework (BSF) which is a variation of the scenario-based approaches in requirements engineering, to address some of the challenges faced by COTS component providers.
They applied evolving versions of the framework to nine scenarios to identify integration issues in the current releases of the COTS components and surface requirements for future releases. The artifacts and processes involved in a business scenario development are described and the experience of the authors is documented.
IBM recently released a RUP Plug-In for COTS Package Delivery.
This plug-in describes the another process of evaluating, recommending, acquiring, installing, configuring, fielding and evolving Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) package solutions. This process is based on the CMU/SEI Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems (EPIC) methodology .