The goals of developing systems better, faster, and cheaper
continue to drive software engineering practitioners and
researchers to investigate software engineering methodologies. In
requirements engineering, the focus has been on modeling the
software engineering process and products for systems that are
being built from scratch. As the size and complexity of systems
continues to grow the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS)
components is being viewed more and more as a promising, and
also perhaps inevitable, solution. The effective use of COTS
components, however, requires a systematic approach that
provides a set of concepts for modeling the subject matter, a set of
guidelines for using such concepts, and tool support to assist the
developer.
In this paper, we present a COTS-Aware Requirements
Engineering (CARE) approach that explicitly supports the use of
COTS components. Our CARE approach is knowledge based, has
a defined process, and is agent- and goal-oriented. In particular,
we present part of our meta-model for the knowledge base and a
prototype of the CARE Assistant Tool. Our CARE approach is
validated using a part of a Digital Library System example. 