The official motto for service-oriented architecture isn't "Always be prepared," but it wouldn't be a bad choice.
Obviously to put together an SOA you'll need more than a neckerchief, a compass and a bag of trail mix, but SOA involves no small amount of preparation. It requires that you think beyond your most immediate project and instead plan out how you'll model and design projects so that you can maximize the agility and interoperability that SOA potentially can deliver.
For those of you looking to get a handle on those issues, we've put together a modeling and design quiz as part of our SOA Lifecycle All-in-One Guide. The resources inside the guide have literally garnered almost 20,000 looks in its first month of existence. That's during a major vacation month. Surely many of you were busy dipping your toes in the sand or calculating how much crushed ice your next drink would require during that time.
Well now it's back to work and the SOA Lifecycle All-in-One Guide gives you a range of basics, best practices and how-to tips on fundamentals, modeling and design, assembly, deployment and management.
The latest quiz focuses on topics such as architecture modeling, entity-centric business service modeling, agile service delivery, service-oriented analysis, BPM and SOA governance. It plugs into the main goal of the modeling and design section – to help you put together quality SOA projects on the blackboard, services that encompass the full range of strategic goals commonly associated with SOA.
Chances are, most people reading this understand the basics involved with service-orientation. What you're probably looking to do now is put SOA into action. This quiz and the section it accompanies should help you do it the right way from the outset.
