About four months ago I was commissioned by a small company to research the Web Services space and define a set of best practices for developing web service components and writing composite applications. This is quite an open ended assignment but the aim is basically to come up with an architect and developer play book. There are many introductory articles on developing service-based applications but this company wanted the specific details of taking a service specification through the software development lifecycle, from inception right through to deployment. They want to take this applications through several iterations and understand how to propagate changes.
They want to be able to gather information and understand the scalability, maintainability, performance, evolution aspects of this product and how it applies to architectural and design decisions. It is a journey that will primarily cover the technical aspects of web services, but will occasionally look at the business side of the ledger.
