Modeling and reasoning about design alternatives of software as a service architectures

Abstract

In general, a common reference architecture can be derived for Software as a Service (SaaS). However, while designing particular applications one may derive various application design alternatives from the same reference SaaS architecture specification. To meet the required functional and nonfunctional requirements of different enterprise applications it is important to model the possible design so that a feasible alternative can be defined. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach and corresponding tool support for guiding the design of SaaS application architectures. The approach defines a SaaS reference architecture, a family feature model and a set of reference design rules. Based on the business requirements an application feature model is defined using the family feature model. Selected features are related to design decisions and a SaaS application architecture design is derived. © 2011 IEEE.

Description
Date of Conference: 20-24 June 2011
Conference name: Ninth Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture, 2011
Keywords
Design guidelines, SaaS architecture design, SaaS tool support, Application architecture, Application design, Architecture specification, Business requirement, Design decisions, Design guidelines, Enterprise applications, Feasible alternatives, Feature models, Non-functional requirements, Reasoning about design alternatives, Reference architecture, Reference designs, SaaS architecture design, SaaS tool support, Software as a service, Tool support, Design, Web services, Software architecture
Citation