Service Oriented Architecture: The Future of Information Technology

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is emerging as an effective solution to deal with rapid changes in the business environment and to handle fast-paced quality of its products prior to implementation. However, literature and industry has yet to explore the techniques for evaluating design quality of SOA artifacts. To address this need, this paper presents a Microsoft hierarchical quality assessment model for early assessment of SOA system quality. Microsoft advocates a “middle out” approach which combines both top-down and bottom-up methodologies. The SOA architectural models are fractal. This means that a service can be used to Expose IT assets (such as a Line of Business system), be Composed into workflows or Business Processes (each of which may also be exposed as a service) and be Consumed by end users, systems or other services. The key result is independent services with defined interfaces that can be called to perform their tasks in a standard way, without a service having foreknowledge of the calling application.