SOA Advisor
SOA Changes Run Deep
The emphasis on total quality becomes absolutely critical as SOA reshapes how IT works.
- By Dana Gardner
- 11/01/2006
Welcome to the first SOA Advisor column, where I'll take a monthly look at the implications of Service-Oriented Architectures in the enterprise, in the development process and in the way IT organizations actually behave.
As an observer of enterprise application and deployment strategies for more than 10 years, one thing remains common: It's very difficult to get people to change the way they think and work. The notion of herding cats comes to mind.
For example, there's the challenge of relating the concerns of far-flung operations teams to those defining services requirements and writing code. Another high hurdle: managing quality assurance across dispersed development teams that are often working for different contractors.
With SOA, these types of cooperation and coordination processes must become make-or-break imperatives.
The relationship between what happens in design time and what happens in runtime may be loosely coupled technically, but when it comes to creating quality services that can fulfill shifting business requirements and stringent SLAs, they're more tightly knit than ever.
Culture Wars
SOA success derives not just from technology and process, but from managing how people behave across disparate groups and even across companies. The good news is that SOA can transform how businesses build and adapt business processes using both old and new IT applications, data and infrastructure.
The bad news? It takes some very deep adjustments to adapt to SOA within large organizations. Groups must change how they interrelate and companies must reassess how they manage cultural barriers so that feedback loops can extend throughout a service lifecycle.
The stakes are high for doing SOA right the first time. The actual use of an independent service in production is hard to predict, inviting unintended consequences in performance, reliability and reuse. It's best to fully define, build, test, retest and monitor that application service puppy before opening the kennel door to let it run wild.
Also, the stakes go up as IT departments morph into service bureaus inside of enterprises. No longer simply a cost center, IT is becoming a core-enabling and differentiating foundation that delivers critical business functions. Quality of service for what IT departments deliver and manage must improve to reflect this.
This is a maturity problem, in part. SOA is still in its formative stages. Yet two vendors are already providing product suites and tools to help developers manage such change, for helping groups embrace SOA, and for injecting quality into the entire process of application and services development.
SOAPScope Server 5.2 works to connect teams of developers to foster workflow collaboration among people affected by SOA principles. The scope goes beyond developers to include line-of-business planners and analysts within their own process types (i.e., supply chain managers). Also affected are the newer groups that handle policy-based management and governance.
Mindreef aims to usher in process collaboration and methodologies for SOA development and refinement by speeding process lifecycle productivity. Mindreef is setting the stage for a governance dashboard on SOA lifecycle creation and management. The nice thing about it: It doesn't force the variables into a central repository (remember knowledge management?). Instead, it recognizes the virtues of metadata. Users can use SOAPScope Server as a centralized repository for SOA development management or as a distributed hub for federated management -- take your pick.
Know Your Requirements
Borland Software Corp. of Cupertino, Calif., is targeting distributed application development quality assurance-important for effective SOA services development. The company is delivering an overlay for QA in the design time process of applications and ultimately of SOA services.
The recently released Lifecycle Quality Management (LQM) initiative shows the depth to which quality assurance can be applied to the entire applications design process. Special emphasis is placed on keeping requirements right throughout the process, as well as focusing on the quality of teams and organizations. The emphasis on total quality becomes absolutely critical as SOA reshapes how IT works.
For consistent quality of SOA to emerge, developers must synchronize their process with their service-procurer cohorts. These service enablers must also be in smooth collaboration with line-of-business people who create process efficiencies in alignment with the dynamic business goals of the day.
Yes, it's Tower of Babel time culturally for organizations. Those who didn't understand the needs of others in an application lifecycle need to gain wider organizational insights in order to tear the Tower down. The free-flow of collaboration must occur among previously sequestered IT fiefdoms, even as it bridges the chasm between IT and business managers.
About the Author
Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research and consulting firm. Gardner tracks and analyzes Web services, application-development tools and application optimization techniques. He is also the producer of the podcast series, BriefingsDirect.