Pluggable SaaS Integration: Quality Characteristics for Cloud Based Application Services

Abstract

Cloud services have recently gained popularity and play an increasing role in enterprise architectures. Organizations adopting cloud services expect not only improvements in flexibility and scalability, but also a means of outsourcing IT tasks. In contrast to custom or packaged applications, software as a service offerings help to reduce the technical expertise required to provide the necessary IT resources. Software quality models help organizations to assess the state of their application systems and have been subject to research for a couple of decades. However, the stakeholder of the existing quality models is mainly concerned with the internal structure of software components. With the shift towards cloud based service offerings, a different conception of quality arises. Current quality models consider resource owner and provider as a single entity. Thus, most of the quality characteristics covered in the models reflect the internal view of a software service. To address the deficiency, this paper puts forward a new quality characteristic that reflects the priorities of the service user as a distinct party, implying six different phases of service consumption. We introduce the notion of pluggability to illustrate the aspired user experience of a service and propose a preliminary measurement instrument.

An architectural perspective on service adoption: A platform design and the case of pluggable cross-border trade compliance in e-commerce

“…The concept of pluggability reflects the software quality criteria that drive the ease of adopting new software services (Aulkemeier, Iacob, and van Hillegersberg 2015). It is defined as a quality characteristic to assess software services from a user perspective.…”

“…The concept of pluggability focuses on the capabilities of a service to facilitate its own adoption within a system (Aulkemeier, Iacob, and van Hillegersberg 2015). It is defined as a quality characteristic of software services and is to be assessed from a user perspective.…”

Sales Forecasting as a Service - A Cloud based Pluggable E-Commerce Data Analytics Service

“…For cloud services, pluggability is one of such quality characteristics. It focuses on limiting the efforts of adopting new services (Aulkemeier et al 2015). In order to transform the core forecasting module into a pluggable cloud service, six criteria have to be met.…”

A pluggable service platform architecture for e-commerce

“…We deduced the software characteristic of pluggability from the lack of the traditional models to reflect the external quality criteria of IT services (Aulkemeier et al 2015). It was formally defined as 'a quality characteristic that describes the external criteria of a service which facilitate its adoption in a specific context'.…”

“…The required efforts during each phase of adopting an IT service has been reflected in the concept of pluggability. More precisely, pluggability is a software quality characteristic consisting of a number of quality aspects to measure the resources required throughout all phases of service adoption (Aulkemeier et al 2015). The lack of current e-commerce architectures to support pluggable services is a potential obstacle for more flexible and scalable collaboration in e-commerce.…”