Hi all

I'm new to this forum, so a hello to you all.

I've been a business analyst for about 7 years now working for 3 different companies in my time. I'm mostly used to UML, SSADM, RAD and working in a PRINCE structure.

The company I currently work for is adopting the SOA methodology and going to agile/scrum development.

Can anyone advise a good book or website where I can read more about business analysis within SOA? Is it much different to UML? What are the pitfalls?

I hope to provide some usefull information to other users on this forum if I can help!

Many thanks for your time.

SOA and UML are apples and oranges... UML (Unified Modeling Language) is a graphical notation for modeling software and processes. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an architectural paradigm which considers the creation of reusable web services when creating software applications.

As a business analyst working on a SOA type project you would not be precluded from using UML. You could use sequence diagrams to show how certain services interact with each other to support a given set of requirements. You could also use an activity diagram to show the business logic implemented by a given service.

You might want to also take a look at BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) as many of the organizations involved in SOA also use a BPMS (Business Process Management System) which tend to use BPMN to model business processes.

You should definitely check out the he series of articles that Sandy pointed you to and check out other SOA related articles here:

Articles on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

- Adrian