# 223 SOA Made Simple Chapters 7-10

This is the last leg of this book review. It is the sort of book that I can imagine one ends up delving into off and on - i.e. excellent reference work.

Chapter 7 is titled - Creating a Roadmap - How to spend your money and when?
Here they forgot to add with whom --)

This harks back to the original SOA goal of bridging the business / IT gap. The authors chasten us in to remembering that SOA - "can result in additional technical complexity and organizational challenges". Ok, so they are preaching to the converted - just remember that this has to be explained in the context of the overall value-add of the business case. The chapter contains many scenarios that succinctly illustrate this.

The Roadmap describes the long term plan/goals along with the short term plan/goals that progress us on the way. They mention various forms of work packages -e.g. service by service, process by process, feature by feature etc. As we progress along the way we also become more SOA mature. The authors discuss this and posit 5 stages from Starting with SOA to Maintenance.  Again very useful concepts to leverage in your customer discussions.

Chapter 8 - Lifecycle Management.
...from service identification to service retirement. 
excellent stuff here - the chapter discusses -

- versioning of services
- types of change (contract, interface, implementation) and their implication.
The section on tooling mentions registries / repositories. For more info on Oracle's offering in this space, please see http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/repository/overview/index.html


Chapter 9 is titled - Pick your Battles

This covers essentially the area of governance from a variety of perspectives -
- architectural
- development
- ops
- change management

The title is somewhat of a misnomer - because if you follow the authors' suggestions here you probably
will end up pacifying everyone.

Chapter 10 - Methodologies and SOA

There are many methodologies out there from Togaf to Prince, BiSL, ASL etc.
In this chapter, the authors discuss how SOA fits into all of this. It may help you pick up your customer from they are at and show them how easily SOA can fit into their world. Very important for the organizational change aspect of SOA.

That's it - an excellent book - well worth the €.