Latest News from John Michelsen

SOA World Expo: The Agile Life Cycle for SOA

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

In the past, test “scripts” in TM tools were largely recorded as actual step-by-step instructions (in a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet) for a manual tester to point-and-click through a finished interface to test the application. When tests were completed, the tester would then “check a box” in the test management UI, to indicate that the test had passed or failed.

Agile SOA Across the Lifecycle with LISA

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:05:00 EST

In this series we are going to look at four aspects of the Agile lifecycle: test & quality management, application lifecycle management, IT operations, monitoring and performance, IT and SOA governance. For years, testing was an siloed activity that used different and unconnected tools within specific phases of the application lifecycle. First, a development team would run a suite of JUnit tests as part of a build process. Then a QA team would manually create and run a suite of functional tests against a user interface. Performance teams would use a separate set of load tests to exercise and monitor the completed application.

How to Manage Application Performance and Load Testing in Virtual Environments

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

Gone are the days when you could test an interface to a single client/server app and know that you have performance covered. Today's interconnected systems such as fully integrated packaged applications, ESB-based enterprise platforms, and SOA make ensuring high-performance from application components and solutions increasingly difficult.

The Cloud Computing Model Won't Catch Up with SOA Anytime Soon

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:00:00 EDT

It will take a while for SaaS in a Cloud Computing model to catch up with SOA. One obstacle for the pure plays in the cloud to join SOA is to recognize and deal with the increased testing and validation of data from even more diverse sources, as well as the governance and validation of all the underlying technologies that contribute to specific business outcomes.

Are AJAX, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and SOA Related?

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 23:45:00 EDT

Server virtualization provides an immediate reduction in hardware and configuration cost. But in focusing merely on the hardware side of virtualization, are we leaving money on the table? While organizations can reduce the number of boxes they need, and save the cost of replicating servers for virtual test beds, these servers are becoming commodities.

So You Have a SOA Management Dashboard. How Do You Drive It?

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:45:00 EST

Lately we've done a lot of research and publishing on how Dev & QA teams can ensure better quality throughout the software development and release lifecycle. But what about the IT Operations guys? It seems we are encountering a disconnect between the Enterprise Architecture and Integration disciplines that are moving to SOA, and the people who need to monitor and maintain these systems in deployment. There are a lot of companies starting to focus on better SOA Governance, which includes the management of business processes and workflows, and the services and applications behind that. Great stuff happening on that side of the IT shop.

European SOA: Ahead of the Curve?

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:00:00 EST

Why does SOA seem to be moving forward a little faster in Europe than in North America? We've posed these kinds of questions in our surveys and forums, and often it seems that stateside, the term 'SOA' can polarize some IT teams - it's an 'either/or' decision at the architectural level. Talking to our EMEA director, Wilfred, he says part of the reason it seems adoption is high in Europe is that it SOA is often driven by developers working in smaller teams. Service-orientation can be started on a much smaller scale, and tested pragmatically before rollout to the larger organization. So, SOA there doesn't need to be an enterprise-level initiative in all cases, it can be something the company dabbles in before making a full commitment.

What Is SOA and Service-Oriented Virtualization?

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:30:00 EST

Service Oriented Virtualization - Webinar & White Paper

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 20:15:00 EST

Virtualization up until this date has largely lived in the data center, where it has indeed saved significant hardware and configuration costs for a given set of servers. But this value has yet to extend to SOA, which is by nature much harder to replicate in this fashion. When you have so many distributed and heterogeneous technologies that are often not available for testing and development purposes, something needs to change to bring back that agility we expected from SOA.

Is SOA Dead, Doomed, or Misnamed?

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 16:00:00 EDT

Many in the media are already calling on the demise of SOA and saying that it's just a passing phase, or it's really just a rebrand of the EAI space, or that it will be segmented only to certain integration-type challenges. We have a bit of a different take. The term SOA will go away over the next several years but it will go the same route that e-commerce applications went. If you think back to the mid-'90s, we started talking about e-commerce as an architecture that was distinct from the then traditional enterprise architecture. However, over the past few years, e-commerce as a term has disappeared because it has become the ubiquitous expectation for how we build applications, or what those applications do (some kind of commerce). It consumed the entire enterprise application space.