Laws of SOA

Forget WS* and products
- SOA is design and architecture. The WS-* standards is not much more than candidate technology for decorating your service endpoints...
Establish service categories and service universe
- Without defining/typing your services, you are building your SOA universe with simple blocks. (We have different types of building blocks for building houses, why not in SOA..)
Find and decompose services
- Focus on the responsibility aspect of your services.
- Split and rule. Remember to satisfy both explicit and implicit consumer expectations
Establish service ownership and Key Performance Indicators for your services
- SOA is challenging on an organization, and as services should provida business value, its a dead giveaway to visualize this value in a graphical dashboard.
Establish design rules for your service categories up-front
- Basically design-time governance...
  - SOA Center of Excellence - Policy Advisory Board
  - Do not forget pre-production service QA
Start limited and controlled
- Start with a vertical, stay 100 % faithful to your architecture and design rules.
- Use mocks/adapters when you have to take shortcuts
Establish lean and agile deployment routines
- Goal: from test to production-test, and from prod-test to production in less than 20 minutes.
  T** his is a major change, which will take a lot of effort, but you have to plan for 10 times as many deployments, so there is really no option