Top 10 SOA Pitfalls: Wrap-up

The Top 10 SOA Pitfalls countdown hit #1 last week with Rik de Groot's post on "Ignoring culture when introducing SOA", time for a wrap-up.

Putting all pitfalls together in one simple 10 item list quickly reveals a grouping of types pitfalls. Number #1 and #2 are both related to organizational aspect. If the culture, mindset and attitude are not right, these are typically the pitfalls that a SOA endeavor may run in to. The next group covers the items #3 till #7, these are all related to architectural/design skills. And the last group, numbers #8 till #10, relates to implementation issues (although proper design could help to prevent these pitfalls from manifesting themselves). The complete Top 10 SOA pitfalls list is:

Implementation pitfalls

• #10 - Not Invented Here Syndrome
• #9 - Versioning
• #8 - Security

Architectural/design pitfalls

• #7 - Incorrect Granularity of Services
• #6 - SOA does not solve complexity automatically
• #5 - Big Design Upfront
• #4 - Incorrectly applied Canonical Data Model
• #3 - Missing skills

Organizational pitfalls:

• #2 - Unclear ownership/Project based funding
• #1 - Ignoring culture when introducing SOA

It was great fun to compile this list with the four of us and it also helped us to get a sharper view on why SOA projects or programs are challenging and hard to complete succesfully. Hopefully you've learned a thing or two and are able to prevent or at least recognize the pitfalls in your day-to-day work. Thanks for having us, Rik de Groot, Viktor Grgic, Vincent Partington, and Gero Vermaas.