A cooperative construction approach for SaaS applications

Recently, much of the attention of SaaS has focused on the new business model that on-demand software enables. This trend requires the agile construction of applications which the long development cycle such as waterfall software-development model could not satisfy. This paper proposes a cooperative construction approach based on multi-level abstraction for SaaS applications, in which the tenant instance of a SaaS application will be abstracted into different levels according to its customization requirements, and then be constructed from different components and through different constructing routes with the collaboration of different participants in a SaaS system. We discuss the multi-level components model, the roles and the cooperative work, the multi-level construction method in details. We also introduce a case study of a SaaS application for supply business in automobile industry with the discussion of agile construction approaches.