muSOAing for 4/22/10

As described in my previous posts, services design and development being a very structured and streamlined process on one hand and Portal Development being essentially a RAD driven function, they are poles apart when it comes to timeliness and synchronization. One answer to this conundrum could be, start Portal development to align with delivery of services but this is easier said than done.

The needs of any organization big of small are such that development timelines are strictly aligned with budget allocations and consumption and department and SOA heads are not at liberty to dictate in most cases the granularity of project plans. The needs of an organization are greater than the needs of a department.

Now back to our original issue, how do you prevent the cart before the horse issue. Simulation has turned out to be the only answer to this. The next question that comes to mind is, whether to build or buy. There are several attractive offerings out there that can achieve simulation but before you get wowed by their features, take a moment, actually several days to come up with your list of simulation requirements and then do a detailed evaluation to see if these tools really fit the bill. The reason I am saying this is because, these tools do not come cheap and for the price you pay, the features they provide is woefully inadequate to your needs so in most cases you are better off building this framework as you then are at liberty to customize, enhance and are in total control of your simulation environment rather than having to deal with a black box product that does not let you customize of enhance.

In our next post we will discuss the key features you need to take into consideration when evaluating simulation tools.