A collaborative requirement elicitation technique for SaaS applications

Software as a Service (SaaS) provides a web based software delivery model to serve a large number of clients with one single application instance. One of the essential problems to SaaS application development is about how to elicit the commonality and variance of multiple clients' requirements effectively. This paper presents a collaborative requirement elicitation technique (CRETE), which keeps each potential client of a SaaS application aware of the requirements raised by other clients or the SaaS vendor and allows a client to vote on existing requirements or raise new requirements. With CRETE, individual client can create and evolve his proprietary requirements model, while the SaaS vendor can automatically get a combined requirements model that reflects all clients' common and variant requirements. The SaaS vendor then can develop a SaaS application according to the combined requirements model, so that individual client's requirements can be satisfied by self-serve configuration without changing the SaaS application's source code.