Running Head: SELECTING COTS 1

Selecting COTS

Student Name

Tutor’s Name

Date
SELECTING COTS 2

When deciding whether to develop or buy off-the-shelf software, the following must be

considered: Does your IT team have the time, experience and skills to develop a software, is the

software to be sold on the market? If so, specific software product development skills are

required (Lycett, M., & Macredie, 2018). Does your business have appropriate testing and

quality controls? Will the off-the-shelf software package satisfy your needs or will you have to

do a lot of customization which will end up costing more money? Is the user experience

engaging enough for your users to want to adopt the solution? Do you expect your business

needs to grow and change (most do) and, if so, will the packaged software solution satisfy your

needs 3–5 years from now or beyond?

You do need to have a detailed understanding of your business requirements before you

decide on a packaged solution. Otherwise, you will get a packaged demo that will look like it

does what you need to do but the devil is in the details and you want something you can actually

use long term. Generally I will avoid to build, but if building add value and save money then you

can consider it. Building it yourself can leave you with technical debt and a burden because the

business depends on it, but once the core team leaves how do you maintain everything and keep

up with the market (Lee, 2019). External software suppliers are usually more tooled up to

maintain software for customers and have an incentive to keep up with market forces.
SELECTING COTS 3

Reference

Lycett & Macredie. (2018). Development of component-based information systems. M.E.

Sharpe.

Lee, R. (2019). Software engineering research, management and applications. Springer.