Testing Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Applications and Services

With SOA, you can move toward a new enterprise architecture, with business functionality exposed as standards-based, shared and reusable services. SOA is a collection of declared services that are independent and loosely coupled, but controlled through policies. The services are self-describing, and they are assembled ad hoc to orchestrate business processes. SOA is an approach to constructing enterprise systems from components in which a system consists of a set of collaborating services corresponding to higher-level business use cases—each of which provides a welldefined collection of functionality available over the network.
SOA is an implementation process of having services that are shared among applications. Service providers create services, and service consumers utilize these services. Composite services are made up of two or more services, and web services create a common platform that enables SOA. There are multiple components to web services:
-  Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) provides the envelope for sending the web services messages.
-  The Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) forms the basis for web services. A service provider describes its service using WSDL.
- Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registries can be searched to quickly, easily and dynamically find and use web services.
The services used in SOA are not limited to web services, but can include other technologies such as Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and XML over Remote Method Invocation (RMI).

Aligning IT resources and business objectives
Companies are looking for ways to move faster to respond to changing business drivers, such as market conditions, customer requirements and competitive threats. SOA allows businesses to react more quickly— with greater agility—and promises to:
- Allow IT to better and more economically support business initiatives
-  Reduce time-to-delivery for new services because the implementation of business processes will be highly configurable
-  Streamline application integration
-  Better utilize development resources through the reuse of existing assetsv SOA offers tremendous business advantages, but it also places pressure on your IT organizations to make sure that services and infrastructure continue to meet the changing needs of your business. You need to implement Business Technology Optimization (BTO) solutions that bring IT into full alignment with the business to ensure that IT is focused on addressing business priorities and delivering maximum value. BTO optimizes the strategic touch points where technology and the business meet, and HP allows IT to enable an SOA lifecycle approach. You can manage service quality and conformance, enabling services to scale in a production environment. HP Software offerings can monitor services to enable compliance and quickly identify problems before they impact the business.
HP offers SOA application delivery solutions for testing the functionality and performance of individual services and composite applications comprised of multiple services, and SOA application management solutions for monitoring and measuring services and composite applications in production based on service level agreements (SLAs).
HP also offers SOA governance solutions for managing the consistency, predictability, change and interdependencies of services and composite applications. By selecting solutions from HP, you can develop, manage and evolve composite applications over time to address new business requirements and enable the successful delivery of the functionality and performance expected by users throughout your organization.

Implications of SOA on testing
The shift toward SOA is not risk-free. Many moving parts must work together closely amid constant change. Services have diverse characteristics. With SOA comes multiple stakeholders—such as service providers and service consumers—and services have independent lifecycles tied to how they are developed and maintained. Successful implementations of SOA require that services remain interoperable despite all of the inevitable changes they face.
SOA introduces increased complexity to IT, and these complexities center on new relationships that need to be managed. There are technical relationships, since services depend on infrastructure and applications depend on services. But there are also organizational relationships. Providers of services need to collaborate across roles and functions to define, develop and manage services, and consumers and providers need to collaborate to negotiate SLAs and other terms and conditions for using a service. Throughout the lifecycle of a service, providers are inevitably going to change the service and consumer needs are inevitably going to evolve.