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.