The business efficiencies organizations are striving for in a Service-oriented architecture come with a distinct level of complexity. Simplistically, SOA allows an entity to distribute work among a battery of applications across departmental, organizational and geographic boundaries. Furthermore, the entity might not ultimately own or manage a service that contributes to the work being performed. This dispersion of applications in context of a widely distributed IT environment leads to a very complex system to test. SOA demands a different quality process than the traditional application-centric process that permeates our industry today. There needs to be a sea change. To ensure secure, reliable, compliant service-oriented architectures the quality process must morph towards the process we observe in real-time or embedded systems.
