Using variability descriptors to describe customizable SaaS application templates

Customizable applications play an important role in software as a service (SaaS) scenarios. SaaS application providers want to exploit economies of scale by offering the same basic application to many customers. As customers have different requirements for the same type of application, SaaS vendors must offer so-called application templates that can be customized by their customers to be tailored exactly to their needs. Therefore variability points (i.e., points in an application template that can be customized) need to be made explicit and constraints for these variability points need to be specified. We introduce variability descriptors as a means to describe variability points for SaaS application templates independent of the artifacts (such as GUI components, workflows, configuration files, etc.) that make up the application

Variability dependencies in product family engineering

In a product family context, software architects anticipate product diversification and design architectures that support variants in both space (multiple contexts) and time (changing contexts). Product diversification is based on the concept of variability: a single architecture and a set of components support a family of products. Software product families need to support increasing amounts of variability, leading to a situation where variability dependencies become of primary concern. This paper discusses (1) a taxonomy of variability dependencies and (2) a case study in designing a program monitor and exception handler for a legacy system. The study shows that the types of variability dependencies in a system depend on how the system is designed and architected