ITKO

Whitepaper: The "3 C's" of SOA Testing - 2008 Edition  Enterprise Software Quality Strategies for Heterogeneous Applications and Distributed Teams PDF document, 2045K Author: John Michelsen, ITKO

In order to achieve the business outcomes we expected from SOA, we need to accomplish Complete, Collaborative and Continuous Testing. This foundational ITKO paper, revised with new information in 2008, covers the best practices and solutions for getting the 3 C's of SOA Testing. If you are wondering how your teams fit into a SOA world, look here for starters.

Quality will become a primary governor on the enterprise's success in successfully achieving the agility and cost benefits expected of SOA. With so many interconnected parts making up applications that can be delivered virtually anywhere, testing and validation are no longer a mere matter of finding bugs within the developer's code, or problems that occur on the screen a given user interface. Software quality processes must evolve with the architecture, to genuinely test a business process and maintain context across the entire workflow.

Enterprises can attain SOA quality by achieving the three C's of SOA testing:

1. Complete testing of business workflows across every heterogeneous technology layer of the SOA, at both a system and component level.
2. Collaborative involvement of the whole team in quality throughout the lifecycle. Enable both developers and non-programmers to define and share verifiable test cases that prove how SOA meets business requirements.
3. Continuous validation of a changing SOA deployment as it is consumed at runtime, ensuring that business requirements will continue to be met as the system dynamically changes.