Classifying Requirements for Variability Optimization in Multi-tenant 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 multi tenant 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 multi-tenant solution is needed. In this paper, we analyze variation in multiple tenants' requirements, to propose a classification for multi-tenant 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.