Classifying Requirements for Variability Optimization in Multitenant Applications

Software as a Service (SaaS) providers can serve thousands of customers, which have hundreds of thousands of overlapping requirements, using a single application instance to offer service at a lower price. Even with a potentially large number of customers with varying requirements, a multitenant application should make co-tenancy transparent to the tenants, which means that every tenant must appear to be the sole owner of the application, to achieve this, a highly configurable multitenant solution is needed. In this paper, we analyze variation in multiple tenants´ requirements, to propose a classification for multitenant application requirements, and implement variability realization techniques depending on requirement levels. Furthermore, we prioritize the tenants´ requirements to satisfy as many customer requirements as possible, and provide key guidelines to software architects and developers to implement a configuration layer in a multi-tenancy architecture.