David S. Linthicum: Is SOA Quality a Priority?
By David S. Linthicum
October 1, 2007 —
(Page 1 of 2)
SOA testing is in the media a bit these days as those who implement SOA have to make sure those new services, abstraction layers and orchestrations are ready for prime time. However, the common approach to SOA deployment is: development now, requirements maybe, and testing if we have the time. You can’t afford to make that mistake; there is too much on the line with this stuff.
Indeed, a recent study by Nucleus Research discovered that existing SOA implementations achieved limited success when considering ROI. Only 37 percent of enterprises have achieved a positive return on their investments from SOA deployments. While the root cause of these low ROI numbers can be attributed to many factors, the key issues relate to a lack of planning and a lack of testing.
Central to this problem is the fact that quality assurance, in general, is an often overlooked concept to most developers and designers. I mean, you’re admitting that your code and resulting services need to be tested. How can that be?
Moreover, those who run SOA projects don’t allocate a lot of time for testing, and typically when projects are behind, testing is sacrificed. But the complex nature of SOA means that testing is that much more important, considering that mistakes and bad services can ripple throughout the architecture.
There are many dimensions to SOA testing. They include services, processes, performance, and holistic or system testing.
Service-level testing is the most important, since core services are the foundation of the SOA. However, services are written very differently, depending upon the developer. Services may also be built on top of existing interfaces and APIs, and thus are even more complex and more in need of quality assurance testing, since you’re placing an interface layer on top of an interface layer. It’s a matter of validating the services for their intended use, verifying that the interfaces function correctly, and validating both WSDL and schema. Also, you need to consider diagnostics for design time and runtime, and make sure to address those older but important notions of unit, functional and regression testing.
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