Methodology and SOA for the Methodology Nazi in You (and Don't Forget Governance)

The title is a little tounge-in-cheek but there is a segment of the software community that cares a lot about application development methodology and making it easier for a large team to follow the associated best practices (and correspondingly harder to make excuses for going off and doing their own thing). The current focus on Service Oriented Architecture has placed a really bright spot light on these issues and the stakes are high for ignoring best practices.

IBM's Rational Method Composer (RMC) can be used to customize an established development methodology such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for your particular project or organization. RMC comes with "multiple process content libraries, including RUP, RUP plug-ins, SUMMIT Ascendant methods, and other processes for Program, and Portfolios management."

Once you customize your development methodology, you can export it to Rational Portfolio Manager to help project managers create project plans. See Exploring Rational Method Composer and Rational Portfolio Manager integration.

You can also export your customized methodology into content that loads into Rational Application Developer for WebSphere (RAD) so that your developers can refer to the guidance from within the same Eclipse shell as they develop their Java code. The method content is displayed within RAD in a "Process Advisor" view as described in New Features of RAD 6 for WSAD v5 Developers Course Outline beginning on page 8.

For those of you who worry about making sure your organization follows a newly established SOA Governance policy as they start creating new business services, rolling out an Enterprise Service Bus, and making "grow my own" vs. reuse decisions, download IBM Rational Method Composer plug-in for SOA governance. This helps "identify appropriate best practices, merged with your existing IT processes, to provide proper governance of the capabilities introduced with SOA. The end result is a project plan to create your organization's unique governance framework." Note the project plan tie-in which would benefit from the integration of Rational Method Composer with Rational Portfolio Manager as described earlier.

For those of you who are both methology czars and service modelers there is a free download UML Profile for Software Services, RSA Plug-In which can be used to customize Ratonal Software Architect for modeling services in an SOA environment. It uses the conceptual model described in UML profile for software services and adds many useful stereotypes to your UML models such as Message, Service Partition, Service Provider, Service Consumer, Collaboration, Service Collaboration, Service Channel, Service Specification, Service, Service Gateway, and Message Attachment.

Copyright © 2006 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.