Dataset from the Paper "A Process Proposal for Requirements Engineering for Third-Party Products and a Preliminary Evaluation at Munich Re"

Context: When in need for a software solution, companies of all sizes prefer buying an existing commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product rather than investing the time and effort on developing and maintaining their own. However, purchasing the wrong COTS solution can lead to a painful and company-critical process as well. Problem: Within this context, the absence of a both repeatable as well as pragmatic approach for the selection of a suitable third-party tool remains a common problem at various companies, including Munich Re. Approach: To this end, this work combines and extends established methodologies aiming for an efficient and effective requirements engineering approach. To validate feasibility of the approach, we furthermore report on a case study at Munich Re, in which we exemplarily apply the process in-vivo for selecting a requirements modeling tool suggested to be used across all
development teams of the whole organization. Results: The application at Munich Re indicates the feasibility of the approach for the selection of a medium sized software solution. Impact: We encourage practitioners to extend the presented method and incorporate it into their own decision-making process for third-party tools, with the aim to making buy-decisions more objective and more efficient in the future.