Section 13.5. Conclusion

13.5. Conclusion

In this chapter, we presented best practices for SOA projects. Most importantly, these practices do not represent or require a new project management methodology. SOA-driven project management means adopting a set of useful, SOA-specific practices that are complementary to an established methodology.

SOA project management starts in the first minute of a new project. A first draft of the high-level service design is a major deliverable from the project definition phase. At the core of SOA-driven project management, we find SOA artifactsin particular, service contracts and services, which we leverage as project control elements. Most important, SOA-driven project management enables the efficient decomposition of complex, potentially heterogeneous distributed systems into manageable sub-systems and the disentanglement of the dependencies between them. If used properly on the project management level, service iterations are the right tool for managing the heartbeat of the project.

Furthermore, SOAs enable enterprises to put an efficient configuration management in place. Nevertheless, configuration management is regarded as a highly complex task, reflecting today's heterogeneous enterprise reality.

Finally, we described service-driven regression testing as another key factor in SOA success. The particular service design enables efficient testing of enterprise applications, that is, the encapsulation of services, their distinguished business meanings, and the clearly defined, coarse-grained interfaces.

References

[Gro83] Groves, Leslie R . Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. Da Capo Press, 1983.

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