Towards a capability and maturity model for Collaborative Software-as-a-Service

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been attracting providers and customers due to the facilities of cloud computing and the outsourcing of IT solutions. SaaS market and related business models are receiving more attention and becoming more mature, which have given rise to other emerging approaches. One of them refers to a more intense software services sharing when companies work in strategic alliances aiming at creating new software products or enhancing existing ones in different compositions. Working collaboratively at business level requires many changes in the way companies develop their software and share them as assets with each other. As companies use to be very different to each other, one way to leverage such type of collaboration is via software improvement models. The main premise is that resulting joint software is trustworthy enough if services are developed following good practices and reference models. However, current reference models and available standards are essentially oriented to traditional software development, not covering services-based developments at all. This paper presents a capability and maturity model for software process improvement in the so-called Collaborative SaaS as an attempt to cope with this gap. The developed model corresponds to a repository of the best practices to services development processes and collaboration, and it was developed based on well-known models and standards. The initial evaluation of the model by specialists raised evidences that the model is quite suitable and comprehensive to support and boost collaboration between SaaS/services providers and it can improve the confidence in the quality of the involved services when developers and customers access the developed SaaS-based software solution.