Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture

Parent SEI Program

Product Line Systems Program

Parent Project

Software Architecture Technology Initiative

Related Publications

Quality Attributes and Service-Oriented Architectures

Approaches to Constructive Interoperability

SMART: The Service-Oriented Migration and Reuse Technique

Acquiring Evolving Technologies: Web Services Standards

Model Problems in Technologies for Interoperability: OWL Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S)

Phil Bianco
Rick Kotermanski, Summa Technologies
Paulo Merson

Technical Report
CMU/SEI-2007-TR-015

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The emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an approach for integrating applications that expose services presents many new challenges to organizations resulting in significant risks to their business. Particularly important among those risks are failures to effectively address quality attribute requirements such as performance, availability, security, and modifiability. Because the risk and impact of SOA are distributed and pervasive across applications, it is critical to perform an architecture evaluation early in the software life cycle. This report contains technical information about SOA design considerations and tradeoffs that can help the architecture evaluator to identify and mitigate risks in a timely and effective manner. The report provides an overview of SOA, outlines key architecture approaches and their effect on quality attributes, establishes an organized collection of design-related questions that an architecture evaluator may use to analyze the ability of the architecture to meet quality requirements, and provides a brief sample evaluation.