A Spoonful of Governance for SOA

"o you have a governance plan?" It's not a question you want to hear while putting together a world changing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Governance is one of those words that can strike fear into the heart of a software architect. Visions of endless meetings and committee reviews immediately give you that queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. Process and overhead guarantee a slow down in an already tight project plan and cause developers to spend more time drawing diagrams and writing documents than actually writing code.

As I delved into the world of SOA governance, I quickly realized that it was nothing new. Rather, it is simply a reorientation and formalization of many of the things good software architects have been doing all along. When you create software architecture, requirements exist that go beyond the immediate requests of the business users. Consistency, repeatability, testability, scalability, and manageability are built into good software architecture. SOA governance ensures that your SOA has them. Governance doesn't have to be a bad word. In fact, you may already have some of the pieces in place for your SOA governance plan and not even know it. If you've spent any time designing software, you might have already solved some of the issues.