SOA Adopters Retrospective Report: Quality Considerations in the Primary Phase

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EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

In June 2008, Parasoft conducted a survey of IT professionals who previously approached Parasoft to learn about SOA quality strategies and solutions. The survey posed a series of questions asking respondents to reflect upon the primary phases of their SOA initiative and implementation—with a special focus on quality issues.

Key results include:

An overwhelming number of respondents (80%) say that SOA requires a different approach to quality than the organization’s traditional quality process.
Over half of the represented organizations seem to have underestimated the need to invest in SOA quality until after the implementation was already under way
57% of respondents feel that the SOA quality team (which included existing QA resources in 75% of the cases) was not adequately prepared for the transition to SOA.
The majority of respondents believe that additional development training (61%) and QA training (51%) would have helped them better achieve their project goals (improve agility, increase efficiency, and better align business and IT).

These results suggest that from a quality perspective, the failure to adequately plan for and invest in SOA quality impeded organizations’ ability to fully realize the expected ROI of their initial SOA initiative.

SURVEY FINDINGS

SOA Demands a New Quality Approach

An overwhelming majority of the respondents (80%) believe that the organization’s traditional quality approach is not sufficient for SOA initiatives.

In the traditional linear quality process, QA waits anxiously at the end of the development process to test the application in a staged environment. This process is inadequate for SOA initiatives for many reasons. For instance, services are not applications but rather small "units of work." Strict conformance to the architecture design is critical for reuse and agility. And services are typically distributed across multiple applications in heterogeneous environments, making it very difficult to stage a test environment.

To address such complexities inherent in SOA quality initiatives, it’s important to have a continuous SOA quality process across the SDLC—not just QA.

SOA Objectives Could Be Compromised without Improved Quality Processes and Resources

Responses to several questions suggest that organizations were not fully aware of the unique quality challenges that SOA presented—until they were in the midst of development and deployment...

To read more, download the PDF.