Software as a service

About: Software as a service is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 8514 publications have been published within this topic receiving 136177 citations. The topic is also known as: Service as a Software Substitute & SaaSS.

Mashup Patterns: Designs and Examples for the Modern Enterprise

Abstract: Enterprise architects think in high-level architectural patterns. This book cuts through the mashup marketing fluff and gets right down to presenting patterns as a way to analyze and solve enterprise problems using mashups. John Crupi, Chief Technology Officer of JackBe and Coauthor of Core J2EE Patterns Mashups offer an opportunity to rapidly deliver value to the business, either on top of an existing internal corporate SOA or on common freely available Internet services. In this work, Ogrinz guides the reader through frequently encountered scenarios in the mashup space. The examples alone will help you think laterally about the problems facing your business and new ways of solving them. Kevin P. Davis, Ph.D., Software Architect Mashup Patterns is an excellent, comprehensive treatment of a subject increasingly central to corporate IT management. With the benefit of his extensive software architecture experience, Michael is able to provide a wide array of mashup solutions to real world data wrangling problems. He clearly explains how to successfully apply mashup patterns and avoid going down anti-pattern rabbit holes. This book is a must-have for developers venturing into the vast and rapidly expanding enterprise mashup space. Daniel Leuck, CEO, Ooi Michael Ogrinz takes a broad view of mashups, focusing on their growing (and potentially revolutionary) role for harvesting and repurposing data within the modern information-driven enterprise. Dont look for code or programming tips here, because you wont find them. What youll find instead are inspiring examples, clever ideas, and new ways to use the data already hiding in your business and in the Web around you. Rob Miller, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology To a user, a mashup has all the personal qualities of an advanced form of spreadsheet, except its not limited only to figures; this is only a fraction of the value that enterprises can gain from deploying mashups as well-managed sophisticated tools. Michael has done us all a service by producing this book as a great step forward in helping IT and business managers to access this value. Andy Mulholland, Global Chief Technology Officer, Capgemini Mike Ogrinz has done an excellent job with thorough analysis of the various mashup patterns. What makes this book very exciting is the timing, when everyone wants to know more about mashups as well as the wide range of audience this book caters to. From director to engineer, everyone can find examples relevant to them. Congrats, Mike, on a job well done! Sona Srinivasan, IT Engineer/ITG Architect, Cisco Systems Michael Ogrinz does for mashups what the illustrious Gang of Four (Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides) did for object-oriented software design. He starts with a buzzword-free explanation of what mashups are and how they matter to the enterprise. He then presents a taxonomy of ready-to-implement design patterns, chock-full of concrete examples. Finally, he includes an appendix of realworld case studies, ranging from a Web 2.0 startup to the Defense Intelligence Agency. This clear, readable, no-nonsense book is a must-have for enterprise IT workers who are ready to embrace the brave new world of Enterprise 2.0. Daniel Tunkelang, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Endeca Mashups tear down traditional barriers around data, allowing it to be extracted and recombined freely. This book provides a new and clear way to think about online applications and about data itself, showing how to build powerful solutions from simple and direct components. Paul Rademacher, Software Engineer, Google, and creator of HousingMaps.com No organization or developer thinking about mashups, SOA, and the future of enterprise development should miss this book. John Musser, Founder, ProgrammableWeb.com Indispensable Patterns and Insights for Putting Mashups to Work in Enterprise Environments Using new mashup tools and technologies, enterprise developers can impose their own APIs on everything from Web sites and RSS feeds to Excel and PDF filestransforming a world of content into their own customized informationsource. In Mashup Patterns, Michael Ogrinz applies the concept of software development patterns to mashups, systematically revealing the right ways to build enterprise mashups and providing useful insights to help organizations avoid the mistakes that cause mashups to fail. Drawing on extensive experience building business-critical mashups, Ogrinz offers patterns and realistic guidance for every stage of the mashup development lifecycle and addresses the key issues developers, architects, and managers will face. Each pattern is documented with a practical description, specific use cases, and crucial insights into the stability of mashups built with it. Ogrinz concludes by presenting twelve start-to-finish case studies demonstrating mashup patterns at work in actual enterprise settings. Coverage includes: Understanding the relationships among mashups, portals, SOA, EAI/EII, and SaaS Exploring core mashup activities such as data management, surveillance, clipping, transformation, enrichment, publication, and promotion Optimizing security, privacy, accessibility, usability, and performance Managing mashup development, from planning and governance through integration, testing, and deployment Enhancing basic mashups with search, language translation, workflow support, and other improvements Performing effective load and regression testing Avoiding anti-patterns that cause enterprise mashups to fail Also of interest: The companion book, Mashups: Strategies for the Modern Enterprise by J. Jeffrey Hanson (Addison-Wesley), is an indispensable guide to designing, implementing, and debugging an enterprise mashup, offering sample code to illustrate key concepts.

User participation in software development projects

Abstract: Introduction It is commonly acknowledged that success in IT projects is difficult to achieve. A recent industry survey observed that only 34% of IT projects were considered successful. Of the several potential factors contributing to this hard-to-achieve success, user involvement was noted as the most important one. Consistent with this notion, both researchers and practitioners have viewed user participation as an important way of improving software quality and increasing user satisfaction and acceptance. Users/customers are often encouraged to participate and directly communicate with developers in the software development process. On the other hand, empirical evidence shows that user participation in the development process can negatively influence project performance since it could make the process more difficult, lengthy, and less effective. Such contradictory findings raise the question of when user participation is actually helpful and when it might negatively impact project performance. Previous research tells only one side of the story since it has examined user participation or project performance by focusing primarily on user viewpoints. The findings give an incomplete picture since they have not thoroughly addressed developer viewpoints. Clearly, there is a need to investigate software project success from the perspective of developers given that not only are they at the core of development process but they also represent the largest single cost in software development. Developer satisfaction is imperative for systems development success. Dissatisfied developers would adversely affect the quality of software as well as the productivity of development teams. A high rate of developer turnover in projects (due to dissatisfaction) could lead to increasing costs for development firms as well as high user/customer dissatisfaction. Due to the differences in background and circumstance, developers and users often share different and sometimes conflicting interests during software development. Researchers have identified a large gap in perceptions and definitions of project success between developers and the software industry (for example, users/customers). For example, developers tend to be achievement-oriented and are intrinsically motivated to develop excellent software, while users/ customers emphasis more on meeting a schedule or maintaining a budget. Thus, the potential conflicting interests between users and developers might negatively affect the software development performance. This article addresses the question of the relative effectiveness of user participation by empirically examining the perceived software project performance (for example, satisfaction) from both user and developer perspectives simultaneously. We used survey data from 117 software development projects and 746 respondents at a large Fortune 100 manufacturing firm during a four-year time period to investigate the impact of user participation on the satisfaction of both developers and users. Our findings offer insights into the impact of user participation on generating higher levels of developer and user satisfaction and, at the same time, minimizing the perception gap between users and developers on project performance. In addition, we also study the role of software complexity (for example, whether projects involve new software development as opposed to maintenance of existing software) in user participation and its effect on satisfaction. Questionnaire data was collected from 453 software developers and 293 users/customers working on 117 software projects (for details of the data collection process, see the sidebar "How the Survey was Conducted"). The average number of developer survey respondents per project (for example, team) was four and the average number of user/customer respondents per project was three. Our analysis was performed at project level, and satisfaction scores for developers and users were averaged for each project. Of the 117 software development projects, 45 (39% of our sample) were maintenance projects and 72 (61%) were new development projects. The average software development time of the 117 software projects was 126 days. Figure 1 outlines the project characteristics in our sample. The most common business domain for our software projects was the manufacturing and supply chain (41 projects, 35%) and most of the projects were Web-based applications (78 projects, 66%).

Cloud-based services exchange

Abstract: In general, a cloud-based services exchange (or “cloud exchange”) for interconnecting multiple cloud service providers with multiple cloud service customers is described. The cloud exchange may enable cloud customers to bypass the public Internet to directly connect to cloud services providers so as to improve performance, reduce costs, increase the security and privacy of the connections, and leverage cloud computing for additional applications. In this way, enterprises, network carriers, and SaaS customers, for instance, can integrate cloud services with their internal applications as if such services are part of or otherwise directly coupled to their own data center network.

Metrics and techniques for quantifying performance isolation in cloud environments

Abstract: The cloud computing paradigm enables the provision of costefficient IT-services by leveraging economies of scale and sharing data center resources efficiently among multiple independent applications and customers. However, the sharing of resources leads to possible interference between users and performance problems are one of the major obstacles for potential cloud customers. Consequently, it is one of the primary goals of cloud service providers to have different customers and their hosted applications isolated as much as possible in terms of the performance they observe.To make different offerings, comparable with regards to their performance isolation capabilities, a representative metric is needed to quantify the level of performance isolation in cloud environments. Such a metric should allow to measure externally by running benchmarks from the outside treating the cloud as a black box. In this paper, we propose three different types of novel metrics for quantifying the performance isolation of cloud-based systems and a simulation-based case study applying these metrics in the context of a Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) scenario where different customers (tenants) share one single application instance. We consider four different approaches to achieve performance isolation and evaluate them based on the proposed metrics. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and practical usability of the proposed metrics in quantifying the performance isolation of cloud environments.