PaaS - black or white: an investigation into software development model for building retail industry SaaS

One of the most important goals for Software Engineering is that end users or those people who understand software requirements but without too much programming experience can build their software products or prototypes easily. The recent success of cloud computing has made a big step towards this goal where Platform as a Service (PaaS) can provide general and comprehensive software development services within an integrated online environment for building Software as a Service (SaaS). However, currently, most PaaS are in a 'white-box' which still requires significant learning efforts for software developers and lets alone inexperienced project managers or end users. Therefore, it is high time that we should comprehensively investigate the challenges for PaaS and provide a suitable development model. In this paper, we firstly identify and analyze the challenges for current White-PaaS through literature review. Afterwa rds, employing the retail industry as a typical application domain, a novel 'Black-Box' PaaS framework is proposed which requires much less learning time and supports much more flexible and speedy SaaS design and development.