Just exited a breakout session from Gartner's Tom Murphy, who is one of the main analysts covering the Testing side of our marketspace, as it edges into Agile development and ALM. His talk, "Application Testing and Quality in the Age of SOA" revisited a theme we haven't touched on in a while here: that in order to motivate and ensure good Reuse, you need Compensation.
Look at it this way: If I am a producer of a service - unless I'm a ramen-eating college student who just likes producing services for the glory of making the next cool widget, I am going to need some motivation to make that service as readily consumable and usable by my end customers as possible. So it falls to the Producer of a service to build quality into their service from the beginning.
Tom mentioned that SOA "offers a platform with a shifting foundation" so a Center of Excellence around SOA testing and quality is needed. The reward for good quality (and useful design as well) is Reuse, and that is compensated with real or "company store" budgetary dollars.
In SOA, quality is not as granular as checking the code for structural bugs or clicking on a UI to test at the end. It requires discipline and specialized tools that directly invoke and verify the services so they meet defined policies - structural, behavioral, performance, and that this process is carried out continuously throughout development and into runtime. That's a lot of responsibility if you have a well-used or critical service.
The part we often forget is the responsibility of the Consumer in this equation - If I am consuming a service, and its underlying architecture, there is no "free beer" here. I should be expected to reward the Producer that makes a service that has the most utility to my business. And in addition, I need to declare exactly how I am intending to use the service so I am not going to impact the promised service levels of other Consumers.
Check out this post from a couple years ago - "Consumption is not Free" is still one of our favorite themes and it's good to hear it again here at Gartner AADI.
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