Everyone talks about how SOA is reshaping the roles and priorities of developers, but how much change can they really be seeing? Maybe the real big changes are happening elsewhere up the food chain.
SearchSOA's Rich Seeley recently spoke with John Michelsen, chief scientist at iTKO, who pointed out that thanks to SOA, "no job is being more radically changed than that of business analyst."
Ironically, developers may see the least impact of anybody from SOA. As John puts it:
"I think it might be fair to say that the individual developer writing code is the least affected because he or she is taking requirements and building a component, testing components, and plugging it into a larger system. That in itself is not that different than it was five years ago. So, ironically, the developer may be the least impacted by SOA."
So what did the business analyst do, exactly, before the advent of SOA? Essentially, they created requirements documents for developers to follow. Usually, in John's words, it was a "Word document filled with 10 Commandments-style 'the-system-shall' statements and screenshots illustrating the functionality end users required."
Now, with SOA, business analysts need to learn to work with business process modeling tools instead of creating 300-page Word documents, John said.
But it's all good, he added.
New business process modeling tools on the market even enable business analysts "to describe processes in business language rather than in IT jargon." In the process, since business analysts now have to describe the overall business application that is being built from the services, this is forcing greater alignment between IT development and the business.
And, after all, isn't that the name of the game for SOA?
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