The Software Engineering Institute has published a new paper "Evaluating a Service-Oriented Architecture".
The report should serve as a basis for an architecture evaluation in the early stages of the SOA life cycle. The architectural approaches and design considerations of an SOA have to be evaluated according to the quality requirements of an organization in order to effectively identify and weigh their risks and benefits:
The emergence of service-oriented architecture (SOA) as an approach for integrating applications that expose services presents many new challenges to organizations resulting in significant risks to their business. Particularly important among those risks are failures to effectively address quality attribute requirements such as performance, availability, security, and modifiability. Because the risk and impact of SOA is distributed and pervasive across applications, it is critical to perform an architecture evaluation early in the software life cycle.
