Software-as-a-Service and Versionology: Towards Innovative Service Differentiation

Version control plays an important role in software industries to manage changes and code development. It is also recognized as embedded parts in various software types such as Content Management Systems, Wikis and Word processors. The emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud computing stimulate the provision of online services via the Internet. Traditional version control systems still provide control over changes to source codes in software engineering, but they are expected to play a major role in service innovation. Incremental changes in service provisions increase value, productivity and consumer satisfaction. From a business perspective, the challenge arises when the revision control helps in to decide whether a new version of a SaaS application should be released and define metrics to determine that users should migrate to a new version after several minor or major revisions. Based on the versionology theory, we introduce a metric-based system to evaluate the distance between successive versions and extrapolate users´ resistance to change and their capacity to integrate a new version. We also conducted experiments to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in service differentiation.