Service and Composite Application Development

The core idea of service-oriented enterprise architecture is transforming existing IT systems into set of loosely-coupled reusable services that enable an organization’s business processes. Although SOA application transformationcan cover significant portions of required functionality, typically some level of custom development is still necessary. Below is a brief overview of the main challenges our customers have faced with similar initiatives.

Demand for ROI

Compared to the ad-hoc development approach, which is not uncommon even in well-organized enterprises, SOA initiatives require significant upfront expenses for setting-up BPMS, ESB, lifecycle management tools, portal, and other parts of infrastructure, which are not easily justifiable for decision-makers. It makes rapid projects with high business impact and visibility extremely important for the full SOA program funding.

Agile software development methodologies, with their emphasis on productivity and business value, are likely to be the natural choice for managing these projects. However, unattended Agile projects tend to exercise the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work" principle to extreme, without taking into consideration the larger SOA picture. To address this challenge, Exigen Services has developed a governance model that produces architectural requirements in the form of product backlog items and establishes an effective mechanism for their verification.

Outsourcing capacity

Typically, several projects are executed simultaneously under a single SOA program. They are mutually independent and often do not require a complicated IT environment setup, which makes them perfect candidates for outsourcing. But generic security, performance and availability requirements will have to be applied to the specific service, and typically its enforcement is the responsibility of the customer’s enterprise architect group. Also, if your outsourcing vendor does not have enough domain expertise, your subject matter experts will have to spend more time explaining requirements to the developers. Both things contribute to outsourcing overhead on the customer’s side and ultimately limit one’s outsourcing capacity. Exigen Services has a well defined methodology with specific sets of roles and procedures that address both issues.

Software development is the core business of Exigen Services. Our CMMI-based process, specifically tailored for service and component application development, empowers us to deliver maximum business value on SOA programs.