You can build a complex house of cards, but when you’re finished, it’s still a house of cards.

The same is true of service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications built without comprehensive quality assurance, says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC. If one of the primary goals of using the SOA approach is agility, it will fall apart if quality isn’t built in to the entire application, he argues in a ZapThink white paper published this month titled, “SOA Quality across the Service Lifecycle”

“This core agility benefit of SOA collapses like a house of cards,” he writes, “if the services or the applications that consume and compose them are of poor quality or behave in an unpredictable manner.”

As Bloomberg sees it, most if not all of the benefits usually listed in support of the SOA approach are lost or at least compromised if quality management is not job one from initial planning through application lifecycle. Beyond agility the benefit of abstracting IT complexity is also jeopardized without a comprehensive quality assurance program. That program must go beyond the simpler task of testing individual Web services to include the quality assurance for the entire SOA application lifecycle, which includes the interactions of all services involved.

“Today’s enterprise IT environments are enormously complex, and it is that complexity more than any other cause that leads to the inflexibility that the business wishes to address,” Bloomberg writes. “And yet, SOA does not actually eliminate complexity–it abstracts the complexity, providing a flexible, simplified set of services to the business that overlays the unavoidable technical complexity. As with any abstraction, however, there is no magic here. To build such powerful services requires sophisticated governance, management, and an overall focus on quality.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices