A modeling language for novice engineers to design well at SaaS product companies

Abstract

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product companies have brought in significant changes in how we build software from architecture and engineering process perspective. SaaS products are large, distributed software systems hosted in cloud and built using collaborating services (or micro-services). The software releases happen in days and weeks, necessitating an agile development process. Novice engineers (those who join the company fresh from college) need to become comfortable with complex systems and proficient in agile delivery with high quality, otherwise they fall behind in productivity. The paper posits that, to be successful at these SaaS product companies, the novice engineers need good modeling and design skills. While this has been for all software development, the changes driven by SaaS products have made this need more acute. Such skills will allow them to capture their feature behaviors (in context of their understanding of the larger product) in an implementation-independent manner and any knowledge gaps can be identified and bridged by their collaborators. We propose a modeling language that is easy for them to learn and use, and which has characteristics suitable for the kind of engineering work they need to do in their early years in a SaaS product company. This modeling language is based on the notion of Transition Systems. The paper demonstrates the usage and value of this language by creating a model for a real feature. The modeling language is quite general and transcends abstraction boundaries. We also present a modeling process that should be used with this language for better results. This is a short position paper that presents an idea about a new modeling language for a specific purpose (helping novice engineers design well at SaaS product companies). Validation studies for the language and the design process is a work in progress and the results will be shared in a full paper later.