Section 8.4. Conclusion

8.4. Conclusion

Ensuring process integrity is often more a project management issue than a technical issuethe available technical solutions are relatively well known, but how and when to select each solution is often a key problem. Finding the right tradeoff between integrity requirements from a business perspective and sophistication of the technical solution is a task that requires careful analysis from responsible architects and project managers.

It is important for project managers to understand that a very clear tradeoff exists between the level of process integrity and implementation costs. For example, while the two-phase commit protocol potentially provides a very high level of integrity (at least in homogeneous, tightly coupled environments), it comes with very high implementation costs because it requires highly skilled architects and developers and very expensive software. However, transactional steps incur lower costs and offer reasonable process integrity properties. They often provide a very good cost/integrity tradeoff (Figure 8-18 categorizes several approaches to process integrity in regard to their cost integrity ratio).

Figure 8-18. It is key for project managers to realize the tradeoff between the level of process integrity provided by a particular technical solution and its implementation costs.

If technical project managers can communicate these tradeoffs clearly to the decision makers at the business level, they enable them to make judgments regarding the level of consistency requirements they have and the money they are prepared to spend on them. Chapter 13, "SOA Project Management," adds to this discussion by providing concrete tools for project managers to enable them to find the right tradeoff between implementation costs and integrity requirements.

References

[Co70]Codd, E. F . A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. ACM Communications, Volume 13, No 6, June 1970.