9 Sep 2012

Five Major Areas to Continually Test Your SOA for Better Autonomy

In Service Oriented Architecture there are no real hard and fast rules that make up a well defined business process or service. However, there are a few little guides that you should keep in mind when managing or building your SOA. Services are not the actual application or system, but they are smaller parts of these systems that need continual testing.

These services should also exist with some high degree of autonomy. They should be able to execute without any dependencies. By keeping this autonomy into the framework, as much as possible, you canĀ  leverage the service itself to better time management and less overall involvement. Here are five areas that need continual testing within the SOA framework to keep better autonomy.

Service Distribution

It must be considered, when doing your SOA testing, that the services themselves are being distributed within the enterprise as a total. This comes with its own set of challenges as it can be complex when looking at the entire service within the distribution. Care, time, and resources should be considered in this testing.

Service Behavior

When testing your overall services, you must also look at the behavior, or the functionality, of the service. This means that the underlying basis, or the fundamental logic, of the service itself is operating as a system that flows information correctly according to the design. This is done with the most efficiency by building up permutations of request input data and XML structure, and mixing them with different security context. Besides this, if the service is designed to provide different behavior according to the information, that also needs to be monitored through the entire process.

Service Integrity

The integrity of the service is its ability to continually return the same type of results over a long period of time. This is best tested through constant cycles that reflect real world values. In another view of this type of testing, you want to make sure that the service has the functionality to produce value to a consumer.

Service Design

The testing of the design itself is an overall picture of the function of the service architecture. You must be familiar with this function so as to adequately see how the service itself is living up to its design. This test incorporates many roles in order to complete including architects, designers and developers.

SOA’s Overall Adherence to Holistic Architecture

In each testing aspect you must remember that the SOA is an architecture. It is a method to achieve objectives and goals through a service designed to function within parameters and guidelines. Because of this you just look at the entire structure holistically. This means working up from the most primitive components of the architecture including information persistence and application development.

In order to continually be in line with your customers needs and wants, you must have a system in place that will consistently guide you in that direction. Testing of your SOA development, management, and processes will keep you in line with where you business needs to go.

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