COTS-based software development (CBSD) is a promising development paradigm used to speedup the software development process, decrease the cost and development effort, and improve the quality of the final software product. This paper reviews various research efforts within the CBSD field for the purpose of better understanding the overall CBSD development process. It also identifies the current challenges associated with the requirements engineering (RE) process for this paradigm. The paper discusses the benefits of adopting software agents in the field of requirements engineering for CBSD. Finally, a wish-list of desirable features of an agent-oriented approach used to address RE challenges for CBSD is proposed.