Introduction to SOA

More and more companies and organizations around the world begin to introduce SOA solutions into their operations. SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. SOA can be explained by:

”A framework for integrating business processess and supporing IT infrastructure as secure, standardized components -  services – that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities.” Source: Bieberstein et al

Introducing SOA usually involves:
• training of personnel;
• support of new tools are needed,
• the development process is changing,
• operation and management work is changing

SOA does not mean that you build a lot of new systems, but instead you should use the existing systems and just develop a standard interface with which we can call systems. This interface is often SOAP.


Examples of key elements of an SOA solution that affects the test work are:
• Web services. These are often implemented through a standardized protocol, eg SOAP or XML-RPC.
•An  integration Platform, eg BizTalk or Websphere.
• Underlying system can for example be a database or other source systems