CHANGES IN REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING AFTER MIGRATING TO THE SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE MODEL

Service-oriented architectures are widely considered to be the determining trend in software engineering. Vendors of software products want to benefit by migrating to cloud environments. However, when transforming an existing software system from the Software as a Product model to the Software as a Service model the software engineering process changes. While the process in general has been researched suf iciently, very low effort has been put into understanding the impact on requirements elicitation. This paper investigates the necessary changes in the requirements engineering process and provides a systematic approach for a successful transformation. Furthermore, it discusses the new benefits in requirements elicitation that are inherent in a cloud environment. The paper then discusses the identified problems and developed solutions with regards to deduced guidelines and best practices. We conclude that the requirements engineering process profits from a systematic transformation when migrating a traditional software product to the Software as a Service model.