Without quality assurance, there is no trust in the services that are delivered via SOA. Without trust, there is no reuse.
Hurwitz & Associates, in conjunction with Mindreef Software, recently issued the results of a survey of 99 enterprises in which hey measured the value of reuse. (An ebizQ news summary is available here.)
Reuse of services was seen as the leading benefit of SOA, cited by close to 90% of the respondents. Just under half of the companies surveyed, 47%, reported they were satisfied with the level of reuse they were achieving. This is a much higher level than in any survey I've seen. In fact, a recent survey sponsored by BEA found that for the most part, companies only expect to reuse 20% or 30% of the services they create.
Interestingly, the report's authors, Carol Baroudi and Dr.Fern Halper, talked a lot about service quality as the way to promote better reuse. "As SOA takes center stage, Hurwitz & Associates believes that unless organizations pay attention to software quality and an overall formal SOA governance process, expectations for reuse will not be realized. According to our results, only 22% of those respondents that have implemented a SOA have some sort of quality plan in place."
How much of a difference can quality make? Quality means more trust, as well as reliability. The authors go on to note that "those respondents who had implemented a SOA environment in conjunction with a quality plan were more likely to be satisfied with their deployment than those respondents without a plan.... 42% of respondents who implemented a SOA along with a quality plan were completely satisfied with the quality of their SOA, while only 7% were completely satisfied if they implemented a SOA without a quality plan in place."
That's a big difference, for sure. What would constitute a "quality plan" for SOA? "A registry and repository is not enough to ensure SOA quality. SOA governance is not enough," the authors state. Rather, quality needs to be a rigorously enforced "strategy." Such a strategy involves moving to standards-based solutions, as well as conducting lifecycle testing of services.
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