SOA Lifecycle

We can find a gap or an improper alignment between IT and business processes in traditional software development an approach which leads to huge gap. Analysis says due to this gap business-critical software services are not able to react quickly and efficiently to the business changes.

Service oriented architecture reduces this semantic gap through a new development model which align the business process services with software development. Let’s look into SOA Lifecyle and the relevant technology we use. Basically SOA Lifecycle divided into four phases:



Process Modeling -
Process Modeling is a critical phase where process analysts work with respective process managers to analyze and get the requirements. In this phase process analysts spent most of their time to define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI), Business Policies and Business rules.

We use Business Process Modeling notation (BPMN) to design business process models.

Process Implementation -
In this phase programmers implement basic services for the business processes and integrate them with the help of analysts. We use Business Process Execution Language(BPEL) to develop the business process. It is very important to preserve the SOA essence factors like 'Reusable Services', 'Loose Coupling','Integration of Services' etc.

Process Execution & Control-
In Process Execution and Control phase, we will execute the developed processes. When execution of process happens they will interact with various external services.

Process Control also important part in this phase where process managers involve in checking whether processes are executing properly and efficiently.

Process Monitoring and Optimization -
Monitoring and Optimization phase is also an important phase where process owners monitor the key performance indicators. Generally we go for Business Activity Monitor (BAM) in this phase to monitor the important parameters and KPI's.

If any service need to raise its optimization level, again the process or that particular service send back to the starting phase i.e. modeling to identify and improve its efficiency levels. All the processes follow similar phases which we discussed above and this happens iteratively without impacting the business.