Cloud-Based Business Applications Development Methodology

Abstract

Nowadays, cloud applications are developed in Platforms as a Service and Infrastructures as a Service. Before the advent of Cloud computing, software engineering knew several approaches and methodologies for application development like: agiles methods and service oriented approaches. With cloud computing and the convergence toward Everything as a Service, application development methods are moving to a new paradigm which abstracts the underlying architecture and infrastructure. We find in the literature, some work describing frameworks and architectures for cloud software development, but there is a lack of a methodology which covers the whole application development lifecycle. Furthermore, these work are mainly dedicated to developers. Our work fits into the perspective of defining a methodology for automatic cloud-based services-oriented business application development. The methodology we propose is designed for non-IT professional users. It avoids the huge technical background needed for cloud application development by automating the process of development, avoids PaaS dependency and advocates the implicit collaboration by reusing and composing services. We define a vocabulary, which is based on linked USDL principles and aims to describe the application requirements in a high level of abstraction of the development details.