Agile and SOA Together: Explore -- But Specify

by Paul Allen

One of the greatest strengths of agile methodologies is that exploratory techniques involving collaboration between people -- the very fabric of software development -- take center stage. At the same time, from a service-oriented point of view, rigor is needed in specifying services and the components used to implement them. All too often we see unhelpful division between agile and service-oriented architecture (SOA) camps. Once we get beyond the rhetoric of methodology, we find a much more basic problem is at work. Two quite fundamental modes of human activity -- exploration and specification -- are commonly divorced or, worse, still muddled. In this Executive Update, we provide advice for avoiding this pitfall, for getting the best out of exploration and specification techniques, working alongside each other.