Ensuring SOA ROI

Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) have gained much attention as a unifying technical architecture that can be concretely embodied with Web service technologies.

As more and more Web services integrate into core processing systems, the reliability and performance of these Web services becomes a primary goal for businesses. Companies must ensure that the Web services deployed are as sound as possible. Outages for critical components in customer services or authorisations could cost companies millions of pounds per hour.

Therefore testing, which is important for any Web application, is even more crucial for Web services. Extensive testing of Web services, particularly those that are externally facing and business critical, is essential to securing the enterprise from significant business risks. A down time of an hour can not only cost substantial losses in revenue but, more importantly, the perceived lack of quality and reliability of the company in general. Any mission-critical Web service must be strictly tested and verified as functioning correctly, 24 hours a day, seven days a week – no exceptions.

This paper will explain issues specific to Web services and will illustrate how automated tools for testing Web services, can ensure complete Web service functionality, interoperability, and security.