SOA STANDARDS EVALUATION

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the first level of SOA is determining which protocols and data structures are “Standard”. If you allow too few standards, you will need to write wrappers for virtually every application, slowing your SOA development and reducing its flexibility. On the other hand, if you allow too many standards, you can create a maintenance nightmare since each protocol requires administrative maintenance and there is little or no coherence in your data structures. Thus, it is important to define a clear set of enterprise protocol and data structure standards as well as the governance procedures to add standards to and remove standards from this set.

Architecture Review deliverables:

• Inventory documentation of protocols and data structures currently in use in your organization.
• Recommendations document describing proposed protocol and data structure standards for integration appropriate to your organization.
• Document describing procedures for addition, deprecation, and retirement of particular protocol and data structure standards.

Architecture Review prerequisites:

• Information on existing applications within the scope of the inventory is available for the project.
• Appropriate personnel including application owners, developers, and architects must be available for meetings and discussion.

Duration: Highly variable according to project scope.

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