The role of variability patterns in multi-tenant business software

Within the business software domain it is crucial for a software vendor to comply to different customer requirements. Traditionally this could be done by offering different products to different customers, but because multi-tenant business software deployments use one software product to serve all customers, this is no longer possible. Software vendors have to make sure that one instance of a software product is variable enough to support all different requirements from all different customers. This ability is defined as tenant-based variability. Within this paper a conceptual model is presented, explaining the role software patterns play in solving variability implementation problems in multi-tenant business software. Different important aspects of patterns are explained, like forces and consequences and are linked to concepts in the problem domain. The paper suggests that variability patterns play a large role in addressing variability in multi-tenant business software and provide a valuable vocabulary for researching, reporting, thinking and communicating about variability solutions in online software products.