SOA testing tools facilitate collaboration

Expertise isn't the only thing that distinguishes the players involved in creating a service-oriented architecture. Location, too, is a factor.

The teams working on application services increasingly are distributed, which can make it harder to make sure everyone is working toward the same objectives, says Chris Brown, a senior IT architect in the retail and channel technologies group at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C.

Having distributed authors increases the importance of publishing such documents as a reference architecture and implementation guides, Brown says. "It increases the need for conformance and for people to have checkpoints along the way," he says.

Wachovia's retail banking division has found a product for developing services that helps team members work collaboratively. They're using Mindreef's SOAPscope Server, which gives the SOA team hosted tools for testing the quality of Web services and ensuring conformance with technical and business rules.

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Expertise isn't the only thing that distinguishes the players involved in creating a service-oriented architecture. Location, too, is a factor.

The teams working on application services increasingly are distributed, which can make it harder to make sure everyone is working toward the same objectives, says Chris Brown, a senior IT architect in the retail and channel technologies group at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C.

Having distributed authors increases the importance of publishing such documents as a reference architecture and implementation guides, Brown says. "It increases the need for conformance and for people to have checkpoints along the way," he says.

Wachovia's retail banking division has found a product for developing services that helps team members work collaboratively. They're using Mindreef's SOAPscope Server, which gives the SOA team hosted tools for testing the quality of Web services and ensuring conformance with technical and business rules.

"Teams can collaborate and share workspaces. That's becoming a pretty popular thing to do," Brown says. "You can set up a test bed and have several people look at it at the same time."

The tools are tailored for IT and business users - architects, developers, testers and business analysts - whose roles and skill sets differ. Traditionally, these users would have separate tools and quality-testing methods. Now they have something in common.

For example, there are three teams responsible for parts of Wachovia's mainframe environment that runs IBM's WebSphere application server. One team runs the platform, one team handles the application code in WebSphere and the third team is in charge of the services that live in the applications running on WebSphere z/OS. Each uses SOAPscope Server in a different way. "They're all looking for different things," Brown says. "It's a three-headed dragon on purpose, but they all understand what the other ones' responsibilities are. There's lot of coordination that has to go on there."

Initially, Brown used the Mindreef tool set for functional and quality testing. Today his teams also are using it to make sure services conform to the bank's established contract policies. "Because it's built into the testing tool, and it's a tool that's available pretty broadly within our environment, people can do self-governance before they get to a formal step in the process of developing a service," Brown says.

In addition, Brown can make sure the most far-flung contributors, such as outsourced development teams in India, have access as well. "I can export the rules out of Mindreef," he says. "If I have an outsourced development team, I can hand them the rules, which they can use and not be connected to our network. It's kind of a portable rule set."

In general, the process of building an SOA for Wachovia's retail division has helped the bank determine how it wants to tackle systems integration in the future, as well as set a strategy for breaking up systems into services. At the same time, it has helped distinct IT teams learn more about how each one works. "We understand the dependencies a little clearer," Brown says.