Service line engineering in practice: Developing an integrated document processing SaaS application
Stefan Walraven, Dimitri Van Landuyt, Fatih Gey, Wouter Joosen · Lirias · 2014
This report presents the application of our service line engineering method for developing and managing customizable, multi-tenant Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. This approach of service line engineering is feature-oriented and highly integrated, in the sense that the feature-level variability that is introduced in the early development stages is consistently and explicitly supported in each of the subsequent stages, also in the run-time environment. The method is generic in the sense that each stage is open for existing work in the state of the art to be leveraged upon, yet it imposes some specific constraints and some enablers, which are crucial to obtain the desired variability of a service line. The example in this report shows a practical application of the service line engineering method in the domain of online document processing. Concretely, it presents and discusses the six activities of the method, including the relevant artifacts and a discussion on the key design decisions. In addition, we present some auxiliary solutions in order to make the generic method effective in practice.