service-oriented architecure - News, Features, and Slideshows

The desire to see information technology align with the goals of the business it serves seems as old as the IT industry itself. The fact that this is still talked about indicates how little progress has been made.
The importance of aligning IT with the business is even more vital when implementing service-oriented architectures. The idea of breaking up the deployment of technology into discreet interoperable services based around business processes requires an in-depth understanding of what those processes are, how they are used, and their interdependencies with other processes within the business.

Some development teams are building a SOA the old fashioned way: Fast.

We questioned three individuals to get viewpoints on SOA testing from three different perspectives: trainer, vendor, practitioner. Randy Rice is a leading author, speaker and consultant in the field of software testing and software quality. Randy's company provides training for SOA testing. Frank Cohen is an author and founder of open source testing software company, Push2Test. Jim Giddings is a practitioner and former SOA road warrior who has worked on several SOA initiatives over the past few years.
What is the biggest change that SOA brings to testing?

Billions of dollars are being spent on the upgrade of banking software systems just so they can compete. But it may lay the groundwork for new, different services - and profits.
In London, customers walk into a bank for a home loan and emerge 20 minutes later knowing whether they can borrow money and exactly how much. In Hong Kong, the locals switch their mortgage between currencies to potentially reduce their debt by playing the currency market. In Australia, a nation that 20 years ago was at the cutting edge of technology in financial services, progress appears to have stalled.

There has always been something alluring about SOA (service oriented architecture), that collection of standards that simplifies and standardises the way various business systems talk to each other.
Linking different systems - especially old legacy systems that were never designed to play well with others - has always been a complex, frustrating and fragile process. Little wonder that the ability to standardise those conversations has caught the attention of countless companies that have spent years - and millions of dollars - bogged down in application integration.