First and foremost is simulating the production environment in development. One of the most important steps in bulletproofing SOA and Web services is ensuring developers have an environment that simulates the production reality. A service that is great in development can have holes once it hits production, resulting in significant time delays and cost overruns. By developing the service in near-proximity to the production environment, the number of surprises when the service hits the production environment is suppressed, resulting in less time needed to tend to those surprises. For example, if a corporation's production environment is going to leverage intermediaries (such as XML Gateways), the development environment should be developing with the intermediaries. Furthermore, the development and test team must have access to a SOA aware testing environment to emulate the production environment...
