Gartner: developers not paid to 'reuse' services

Paolo Malinverno, vice president of research at Gartner, said SOA will fail without proper governance, because without governance, developers will ignore any reuse credos. Quoted in ComputerWeekly, Malinverno was speaking at an SAP conference when he warned that developers should not be allowed to modify an SOA. "Public enemy number one is when a developer makes changes to services," instead of reusing code, he said.

Malinverno is not anti-developer, but thinks developers have not been in a position to grasp the reuse/sharing urgency behind SOA. Instead, they are typically paid to write as much code as possible -- and in fact, have their productivity judged on the volume of code they produce. If a developer is able to quickly build application flows on reusable services without spending much time actually programming, he or she may be perceived as not needed, and put himself/herself out of a job.

Thus, we face yet another challenge to the reuse/sharing ethos of SOA, considered to be its prime advantage. A few days ago, I discussed David Chappell's issues with reuse at this blogsite.

So, don't blame the developers for SOA-gone-awry -- the issue always goes back to that vexing problem of corporate culture, and management vision. Good corporate governance overall begets good SOA governance. The question is, is a tight, disciplined SOA governance structure forceful enough to compensate for an outdated corporate incentive structure?