Todd Biske: Outside the Box

The latest ZapForum Podcast was a conversation between Ron, Jason, and Charles Stack from Flashline. As always, this was an excellent conversation. One of the things that was very interesting for me was the three patterns for SOA governance that Charles introduced. They were:

1. The gating pattern. You need to have appropriate gates in the development lifecycle at which reviews can occur. This is absolutely critical to avoiding JBOS. The development team is most likely to develop to the constraints of the project at hand. If you don’t provide an external review that brings in a perspective from outside of those constraints, your chances of getting a service that is useful outside of that project are very slim.
2. The library pattern. This is self-explanatory. If you want people to reuse services, they need someplace to find them.
3. The dashboard pattern. Measure and monitor! This has been a key part of Flashline’s products from their early days exclusively focused on reuse. Even beyond reuse, it’s amazing what insight you can get into your systems by add a little bit of metrics. It’s very easy to add a SOAP mediation layer in to collect this information.

To this list, I add a fourth pattern: the legislation pattern. We can’t do a review unless we have something to review against. What’s really interesting about this one, however, is the different approaches to legislation. It’s very important to pick a legislative, or governance, style that matches your corporate culture. There are direct parallels to traditional government. Google “types of government” and you’ll find a number of them (this site has quite the exhaustive list). There is no one style that is best, and you need to match your company culture. A country rooted in deep religious beliefs is going to tolerate a theocracy much better than a statocracy. If you presently have no formal reviews in your enterprise, you need to give careful thought to whether legislation should be done in a dictatorial fashion (sometimes a strong arm is needed to lay down the law) or whether legislation should be more democratic in nature, to build the backing of the developers that must adhere to the law. Anarchy will definitely not get you an SOA. Too many legislators may stymie the agility and flexibility you hope to achieve through SOA. What approach to governance is your enterprise taking?

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