Abstract: | Several empirical studies have been conducted on issues related to the development of systems using commercial off-the-shelf and open source software components. The results demonstrate a discrepancy between academic theory and industrial practices regarding the use of components. One reason is that researchers have empirically evaluated only a few theoretical methods; so, industrial practitioners have no reason to adopt them. Another reason might be that researchers have specified the application contexts of only a small number of theories in sufficient detail to avoid misleading users. Academic researchers often hold false assumptions about industry. For example, research on requirement negotiations often assumes that a client will be interested in, and be capable of, discussing a project's technical details. However, in practice this is usually not true. In addition, the quality of a component in the final system is often attributed solely to component quality before integration, ignoring quality improvements by integrators during component integration. |