Mike Kavis Talks with John Michelsen about Successful SOA Testing

Mike Kavis writes the blog, Enterprise Architecture and Other Enterprise Topics. Mike is currently CTO/Chief Architect at technology startup and has his own consulting company called Kavis Technology Consulting where he provides advice, training, and professional services on key technologies. He is also known as the "Mad Greek" in blogger and Twitter circles.      

 Mike recently talked with ITKO’s John Michelsen about questions to consider before building a SOA testing team. His questions came from a recent post he did on CIO.com, Six Questions to Consider Before Building a SOA Testing Team. Mike’s first asked John to identify some of the characteristics of successful SOA implementations from his customer base. John said that integrating testing into the entire development lifecycle is the key. Successful SOA implementations stay away from old waterfall methodologies and involve QA at the earliest opportunity. In many cases, testers work side by side with developers.  

Mike referred to another of his posts, SOA Skillsets: Part 4 - The Testers, that provides a similar viewpoint. He recommends that the Test Architect become a member of the EA team. In this post, he goes on to describe the skill sets for SOA Test Architect, SOA testing leads, business process testers, integration testers, user interface testers, and data service testers. In their conversation John stated that “most QA folks are still business analyst types and it should stay that way. If QA gets too technical then they lose the focus on testing.” Mike agreed and John added that this sets up the requirement that SOA testing tools should let less technical people perform technical tasks. 

John then went on and described LISA Continuous Validation Service and Virtual Service Environment which both accommodate the requirements they discussed. There is much more in Mike’s post and we appreciate him posting the conversation.