Statistics: (1950 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Sunday, June 01, 2008 Categories: Business Process Management (BPM), Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

Development projects for service-oriented solutions are, on the surface, much like any other custom development projects for distributed applications. Services are designed, developed, and deployed alongside the usual supporting cast of front and back-end technologies. Once you dig a bit deeper under the layers of service-orientation, though, you'll find that in order to properly construct and position services as part of a standardized SOA, traditional project cycles require some adjustments.

As we can see in Figure 1 (see below), common delivery lifecycles include processes specifically tailored to the creation of services in support of SOA. In the service-oriented analysis stage, for example, services are modeled as service candidates that comprise a preliminary SOA. These candidates then become the starting point for the service-oriented design phase, which transforms them into real world service contracts.

Service-oriented analysis (and a related sub-process known as service modeling) represent an important part of service delivery that requires the involvement of business analysts and very much demonstrates how business analysis in general is affected by SOA. We'll discuss these processes in more detail later in this series. For now, our focus is on the project lifecycle and its relationship to business analysis.

Author: Thomas Erl