ABSTRACT :

Law enforcement agencies faced with the aims of building major Crime Analysis Software (CAS) from Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products .Thus, they must study and examine the available (CAS) commercial products to determine their suitability for use in a particular system. The number of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) based crime analysis systems being built continues to increase. Consequently, the need for a model that ensures quality characteristics of such systems becomes a necessity. The Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) approach changed the focus of software engineering from one traditional system specification and construction to one requiring simultaneous consideration of the system context (system characteristics such as requirements, cost, schedule, and operating and support environments). The general Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) based crime analysis systems evaluation approaches are criticized for labour intensive activities to define evaluation criteria. Further, none of the approaches are specifically targeted towards requirement tools. Therefore, the evaluation criteria, the measurement, and the process definition are time consuming and domain knowledge demanding. Consequently, a new model specialized in evaluating COTS-components based crime analysis systems is needed to overcome the problems encountered with general quality models and current COTS selection methods.