Under the governance umbrella

In a recent post, I quoted Brenda Michelson's view of the three places where SOA needs more work, including service definitions, semantic understanding, and establish formal SOA programs.

A couple of readers have added their input. CBenedetto suggests adding SOA testing as another key area of SOA-based development and operations. "Testing should not be left to the last stage and should be inherent in every stage of rolling out SOA and integration initiatives. A commitment to SOA success is a commitment to SOA quality which means unit, regression, and end-to-end testing."

Miko Matsumura (Infravio) believes that all these activities all fall under the umbrella of governance. "It's important to understand that there's a body of work on these problems and that folks are working to make all three things a bit more manageable," he said. "Service definition and description is about metadata, and metadata is in the registry repository."
Semantics may be "somewhat less governance centric," but form the first level of interoperability, which includes "things like transformations, which are metadata."
And, finally, he notes, "the idea of an SOA Program lies at the core of SOA governance. Evangelism, organization and human behavior is easily more than half of an SOA, and without organizational buy in, your SOA will have a hard time scaling up."