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 composed to fulfill organization business processes. Although SOA application transformation can cover significant portions of required functionality, typically there is still enough space for custom-made services. Below is a brief overview of the major challenges that our customers have faced in similar initiatives.

Demand for ROI

Comparing 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 whole SOA program funding. Agile software development methodologies with their emphasis on productivity and business value a likely to be the natural choice to run such type of projects. However, unattended Agile projects tend to exercise the "do the simplest thing, that could possibly work" principle to extreme without taking into consideration a larger SOA picture. In order to address this challenge, Exigen Services have developed a governance model that produces architectural requirements in the form of product backlog items and established an effective mechanism for their verification.

Outsourcing capacity

Typically, several projects are executed simultaneously under a SOA program. They are quite mutually independent and often do not require any 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 lays on the customer’s enterprise architect group. Moreover, 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 the outsourcing overhead on the customer’s side and ultimately limit one’s outsourcing capacity. Exigen Services has a very well defined methodology with specific sets of roles and procedures that address both issues.

Software development is exactly 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 for our customer’s in their SOA programs.