Virtually all software systems built today include pre-existing components developed by others (OTS, Off-the-Shelf or COTS, Commercial ditto). This trend has been accompanied by research into, among others, methods for evaluating and selecting components to use in a system. This paper presents a literature survey of the software component selection methods published to date. Based on this survey, a meta-model is presented, which allows for easy comparison of the methods. For each part of the meta-model, we present the best practices collected from all the existing models, thus presenting the collected experience of many research efforts in a checklist-like way. The model and practices presented are useful when choosing a method for a particular project.