We can identify a set of common life cycle stages of a SOA project, such as SOA feasibility study, service oriented analysis, service oriented design, service development, service testing, service deployment etc.. In his book, SOA governance, Thomas Erl describes organizational roles which are associated with one or more of those SOA project life cycle stages. Thomas Erl specifically defines SOA Quality Assurance Specialist role who is primarily involved in the testing stage of a SOA project. He also states the importance of possessing expertise in both business domain and technology.
While agreeing with Thomas, I would expect much more contribution than mere testing of solutions from SOA QA specialist in a SOA project.
- SOA life cycle governance
SOA governance specialist is primarily responsible for the execution of governance process in a SOA project. However, as defined by Ian Sommerville in his book on Software engineering, quality assurance is an umbrella activity which spreads through out the projects from inception to delivery. Therefore, ideally, the SOA QA specialist should be able to play the governance specialist role.
- Service oriented test analysis
SOA QA specialist should actively be involved in all service analysis, design phases and gather data about possible failures of the solutions, testing requirements, security requirements etc.. Also, the QA specialist should identify consumer applications in advance, the nature of the production environment and be prepared with simulating complex application integrations.
- Service testing at the early stages of the project
As I explained in Quality The key to successful SOA presentation, early testing will be most important aspect of SOA testing effort. SOA QA role should use mock services to simulate the services which are not implemented yet or not available for testing instead of waiting till they are ready for testing.
- Test automation
Test automation is a must-have condition for SOA projects due to the likelihood of frequent requirement changes and rapid release cycles. It will be always important to have a comprehensive automation plan which will be driven by everyone involved in project, not limited to testers.
Since SOA has gone from nice-to-have to have-to-have, we would expect a greater involvement of QA in SOA projects.
