Joe McKendrick, ebizQ's SOA in Action Blogger, is a nationally published author and consultant
with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in
the technology industry. He is a contributing editor to a number of
national and international publications and Websites including
Database Trends & Applications, ZDNet, and Webservices.Org. He also
serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., and is lead analyst for Evans'
Web services and enterprise development management issues surveys.
SOA in Action Blog
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« Sometimes, SOA means 'letting go' | Main | New study measures value of SOA reuse » September 08, 2006Visualize SOA (and automate what you can't visualize) Can SOA testing be made more intuitive? ebizQ colleague Brenda Michelson recently posted some interesting observations on progress being made on this front. As with all complex undertakings, visual representation is the best path for efficiency and understanding the relationships between services that are being assembled or mapped to business processes. It has worked well in software development itself, and, for that matter, anything else involving computers. Witness the success of anything GUI-ized over the years. Let me add these thoughts: What can't be aided through graphic visualization needs to be automated, especially in the emerging world of SOA testing. Over the years, I have had opportunities to chat with folks active in the SOA testing space, including Narendra Patil of Optimyz and Wayne Ariola at Parasoft. They point out that while organizations are just getting started with the deployment of multiple, managed groups of Web services or SOAs, testing such services could prove to be far more complex than it was in the world of siloed applications. A growing number of Web services requires a multiple testing scenarios that grow in volume by geometric proportions. As Nerendra put it in a discussion we had a while back: “If you have 10 WSDLs, and each has 10 Web services operations, then you're talking 100 combinations. And if each operation just has 10 test data points, then you're talking 1,000 combinations. Sending 1,000 requests and getting responses and manually verifying them is a one-by-one, very sequential process.” (The complete interview is posted here at Webservices.Org.) Visualize -- and what you can't visualize, automate. SOA is a network effect, with many moving parts relying on other moving parts inside and beyond the firewall. Posted by joemckendrick in SOA | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry:
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