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Top 10 SOA Pitfalls: Wrap-up

29 Jun, 2008
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The Top 10 SOA Pitfalls countdown hit #1 last week with Rik de Groot’s post on "Ignoring culture when introducing SOA", time for a wrap-up.
Putting all pitfalls together in one simple 10 item list quickly reveals a grouping of types pitfalls. Number #1 and #2 are both related to organizational aspect. If the culture, mindset and attitude are not right, these are typically the pitfalls that a SOA endeavor may run in to. The next group covers the items #3 till #7, these are all related to architectural/design skills. And the last group, numbers #8 till #10, relates to implementation issues (although proper design could help to prevent these pitfalls from manifesting themselves).

The complete Top 10 SOA pitfalls list is:
Implementation pitfalls

  • #10 – Not Invented Here Syndrome
  • #9 – Versioning
  • #8 – Security

Architectural/design pitfalls

  • #7 – Incorrect Granularity of Services
  • #6 – SOA does not solve complexity automatically
  • #5 – Big Design Upfront
  • #4 – Incorrectly applied Canonical Data Model
  • #3 – Missing skills

Organizational pitfalls:

  • #2 – Unclear ownership/Project based funding
  • #1 – Ignoring culture when introducing SOA

It was great fun to compile this list with the four of us and it also helped us to get a sharper view on why SOA projects or programs are challenging and hard to complete succesfully. Hopefully you’ve learned a thing or two and are able to prevent or at least recognize the pitfalls in your day-to-day work.
Thanks for having us,
Rik de Groot, Viktor Grgic, Vincent Partington, and Gero Vermaas

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