A study for representing and managing propagation in configuration reauirement of SaaS

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now a mainstream trend in the web-based commercial software market. One of essential qualities of SaaS is configurability, to satisfy more customers, following the long-tail economic model. Therefore, developers should consider system-wide configuration requirements during the early stage of SaaS development. Since configuration requirements are scattered in various parts of the system and dynamically inter-related, it is very costly to manage changes in the requirements. We propose a representation method for managing propagation in configuration requirement change. We also compare our method with existing approaches to validate the usefulness of our approach.