In order to reduce the overall application expenses and time to market, SaaS (Software as a Service) providers tend to outsource several parts of their IT resources to other services providers. Such outsourcing helps SaaS providers in reducing costs and concentrating on their core competences: software domain expertises, business-processes modeling, implementation technologies and frameworks etc. However, when a SaaS provider offers a single application instance for multiple customers following the multi-tenant model, these customers (or tenants) requirements may differ, generating an important variability management concern. We believe that variability management should also be outsourced and considered as a service. The novelty of our work is to introduce the new concept of Variability as a Service (VaaS) model. It induces the appearance of VaaS providers. The objective is to relieve the SaaS providers looking forward to adopt such attractive multi-tenant solution, from developing a completely new and expensive variability solution beforehand. We present in this paper the first stage of our work: the VaaS meta-model and the VariaS component.
Variability represents an important challenge in multi-tenant SaaS applications. In fact, even if multi-tenancy realizes SaaS providers dream of having a single maintained software instance serving multiple customers (tenants) for common functionality, variations in tenants needs and their specific requirements at many places of the application bring providers back to the real world. They face an additional design concern: supporting application variability on a pertenant basis. In this paper, we focus on such variability concern and try to reduce its complexity by decoupling its management through different application layers. We rely on a two-steps decoupling approach: the first step consists of representing application variations as an explicit variability model while the second step consists of choosing the must appropriate application layer(s) to manage each variation. Our approach is illustrated by relying on a case study from the food industry.
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