Anti-Blueprints

["Jones, Steve G" <steve.g.jones@capgemini.com>]

The SOA Blueprints will lay down a “best practice” set of guidelines and templates for delivering SOA.  This will definitely be a positive thing and help expand and firm up people’s understanding of SOA.  One thing that the group states that it will do is define standards and guidelines, does this mean that allied to our blueprints we must also consider the “anti-blueprints” (analogous to anti-patterns) that must be avoided.  So for instance focusing on process over service (bad), only thinking of web services (bad) etc etc.  Defining the blueprints give guidance towards success criteria, but should we also give guidance on failure criteria for acceptance of a system as being “SOA”.

  

Not sure whether this should be in the TC as its laying down best practice, and not to increase the already large workload… but it needs to be somewhere.

 

My top 5 are

 

1)       If you’ve started with an enterprise “best practice” process map you are NEVER going to be SOA and 90% probability your system will be inflexible or fail.

2)       Web Service point to point is STILL point to point, doing a bad practice in XML doesn’t make it better

3)       Splitting into two separate tiers of Service and Process with separate rules and governance results in divergent solutions

4)       Creating “business” services based on the belief that IT understands the business results in services that meet neither IT nor business goals

5)       Building your own proprietary XML-RPC stack to give yourself “control“

 

The last could still be SOA from one perspective, but I’ve yet to see it done well when the driver was a belief that its better done in house than using standards.  When we get the official Wiki it could be something to document via that route.

 

Steve

 

 

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Steve Jones | Capgemini

CTO, Application Development Transformation

T +44 870 906 7026| 700 7026| www.capgemini.com

m: steve.g.jones@capgemini.com

txt: +44 (0) 7891157026

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