Sunday, August 23, 2009

Traditional Acceptance Testing and SOA agility/quality

Its good to see articles that challenge the status quo. I saw one at Sys Con which looked at agility and quality and posited a different development triangle to the traditional time-scope-cost triangle.
To set the scene it looks at an apparent conflict between quality and agility in development.

"Organizations don't have to sacrifice quality to obtain agility. They must rethink what they mean by quality in the SOA context. As ZapThink has discussed before when we explained the meta-requirement of agility and the SOA agility model, the agility requirement for SOA vastly complicates the quality challenge, because functional and performance testing aren't sufficient to ensure conformance of the SOA implementation with the business's agility requirement.

To support this agility requirement, therefore, traditional pre-deployment acceptance testing is impractical, as the acceptance testing process itself impedes the very agility the business requires. Instead, quality becomes an ongoing process, involving continual vigilance and attention. Quality itself, however, need not suffer, as long as the business understands the implications of implementing an agile architecture like SOA."

Worth reading.

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