Journal first presentation of a comparative study of workflow customization strategies

Majid Makki, Dimitri Van Landuyt, Bert Lagaisse, Wouter Joosen
2019 Proceedings of the 23rd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - volume A - SPLC '19  
Multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications share a single runtime instance among multiple customer organizations (tenants). To account for differences in tenant requirements, they have to support run-time customization. The latter turns these types of applications into a dynamic software product lines involving a wide range of software artifacts such as user interfaces, databases, web-services and business process or workflow definitions. This paper analyzes and compares the quality
more » ... implications of different business process customization strategies for multi-tenant SaaS applications. The customization strategies are selected from an existing survey and the comparison criteria are derived from two essential characteristics of SaaS: it is (i) a business model aiming at "economies of scale", and (ii) a software delivery model with specific automation requirements. The comparative study shows that there is no single best strategy, and provides SaaS architects with support for making appropriate trade-off decisions when adopting a workflow customization strategy. As a by-product of this study, a number of points for future improvement and innovations in existing workflow technology are identified, which are exclusively relevant for multi-tenant SaaS applications. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software organization and properties; Software creation and management; Software product lines.
doi:10.1145/3336294.3342371 dblp:conf/splc/MakkiLLJ19 fatcat:xpgxgfezfbc47kp2t5wrc52vve