Friday 31 January 2014

Software Engineering: A Road Map For Adoption Of Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is emerging as a main technique for designing and integrating enterprise applications. Here I present a roadmap for adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture. In order to adopt SOA,a proper roadmap should be followed which has three levels i.e.,management level,organization level and process level.Starting from planning a proper strategy and moving through various steps, here I discusse all steps in order to adopt SOA and  ending at proper implementation of SOA by migrating from legacy application to the loosely coupled SOA services.

Features of Service Oriented Architecture

It emphasizes on services to enhance performance for any organization by using services as business functions. These services can be used as a basic unit to make bigger and difficult processes so as to achieve the aim of the organization.Besides services, SOA also provides a platform  that  makes these services compatible with organization functions.
This roadmap  provides solutions which may alter on need.So this approach  provides a jelled collaboration between organization functions and technology.
A service is autonomous to perform a particular task and is loosely coupled.Web service is used to communicate between service provider and consumer by utilizing SOAP, REST.

Nicely designed SOA services have following features:

1-  Module – Services work as separate modules that are combined to make more different  services.
2-   Services are placed at different locations on a network , and works independently. These  services can be accessed from any location with proper authorization.
3-       They can be reused and are designed keeping in view the business logic.
4-       Services are loosely coupled.
5-  Governance layer ensures the proper governance of these services. It deploys various organization policies in a proper way to ensure best utilization of these services.

Steps Required for SOA Adoption

A roadmap for the adoption of service oriented architecture includes the following steps;

·         Set strategy
·         Plan strategy
·         Align strategy according to organizational requirements
·         Planning operations
·         Design
·         Implementation
·         Monitoring and Testing
·         Establishment
·         Feedback
·         Rectification if required

Proposed Solution

Every operation in an organization is first evaluated from managers and stakeholders point of view. Then it is checked at organizational level and in the end  it is checked as how to implement that operation at process or component level. Our proposed roadmap covers all these three levels. First level is management. This level includes business managers, business owners,businessshareholders and other stakeholders. Goals, mission and vision of any enterprise are considered to be organizational strategies.These strategies are set by top management.At organizational level operations are reviewed from organizations point of view. Finally, to implement the new operations, organization business process is coordinated with technology.


SOA adoption management roadmap has ten steps. In early step, main task requires analyzing vision and mission strategy. In the next step, organization strategy is developed and is evaluated on the requirements and available budget. The third step finds the business processes and their respective relationships. In the fourth step, legacy systems documentation is evaluated so as to reuse legacy applications as services. In fifth step a design pattern for a selected service is chosen which is suitable for implementation. Then, building selected service is started using design pattern and migration strategy.Best security and other policies are applied in governance layer. Services are tested for use in internal and external clients. The government stage has repository and directory service to register implemented services. In establishment and feedback step, services are used in the organization. On the basis of feedback, rectification is done if required.  The cycle (first step to tenth step) continues until complete migration.

Conclusion

The primary objective of an organization is to acquire more business age working in real time. So as to achieve these objectives any organizations has to move through various processes which in turn strengthens the relationship between business and IT.SOA adoption strategy should not be sudden replacement of existing legacy systems rather it should be slowly incremental process so that sudden replacement should not affect the existing systems and environment . So SOA adoption is a time consuming process. In the proposed roadmap all the steps have been discussed in detail at each level.Still a lot of work can be done in this area for more smooth transformation from legacy applications to service oriented architecture.








No comments:

Post a Comment