There are plenty of examples of government agencies demanding service-oriented approaches to programs and projects, including the recent revelation that the Department of Defense and Veteran’s Administration plan to spend more than $1 billion to bring their systems together in an SOA way.
However, Michael Daconta, writing in Government Computer News, says that government agencies should think twice before diving into SOA, along with other new initiatives such as cloud and agile development.
He observes that while SOA is “absolutely the right approach” to new application development, “has not yet convincingly addressed older applications.” Cloud computing is even more suspect, and it’s too early to move in this direction, he points out. Adopting the “fad now, before standards are in place and security concerns are dealt with, is a complete waste of time,” he writes.
Agile development? Don’t even think about it for government work, he adds. “In my more than 20 years of software development experience, I have never met a government program manager who is available on a daily or even weekly basis to help design an application on the fly…. Please don’t build the next space shuttle that way.”
