Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems (EPIC): An Overview

Government and private organizations are escalating their use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and other pre-existing components in critical business systems. Attempts to exploit these components through use of traditional engineering approaches that involve defining requirements, formulating an architecture, and then searching for components that meet the specified requirements within the defined architecture have been disappointing. The Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-based systems (EPIC) redefines acquisition, management, and engineering practices to more effectively leverage the COTS marketplace and other sources of pre-existing components. This is accomplished through concurrent discovery and negotiation of diverse spheres of influence: user needs and business processes, applicable technology and components, the target architecture, and programmatic constraints. EPIC codifies these practices in a structured flow of key activities and artifacts. This alternative approach is a risk-based, disciplined, spiral-engineering approach which leverages the Rational Unified Process (RUP). This document is the first release of an overview of the EPIC framework along with its activities and artifacts. The first release of the full description of EPIC is found in the Software Engineering Institute technical report: Evolutionary Process for Integrating COTS-Based Systems (EPIC). These documents will be updated based on reader's comments and lessons learned from use of EPIC.