A Quality Model for Evaluating Software-as-a-Service in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. One type of cloud service, SaaS is commonly utilized and it provides several benefits to service consumers. To realize these benefits, it is essential to evaluate the quality of SaaS and manage relatively higher level of its quality based on the evaluation result. Hence, there is a high demand for devising a quality model to evaluate SaaS cloud services. Conventional frameworks do not effectively support SaaS-specific quality aspects such as reusability and accessibility. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive model for evaluating quality of SaaS. We first define key features of SaaS. And then, we derive quality attributes from the key features, and define metrics for the quality attributes. To validate our quality model for SaaS, we conduct assessment based on IEEE 1061. By using the proposed SaaS quality model, SaaS can be evaluated by both service providers. Furthermore, the evaluation results are utilized as an indicator for SaaS quality management.