Rational SOA lifecycle management solutions

If you need to:

• Ensure that business goals and requirements drive downstream design, development, and testing

• Verify that business requirements were accurately captured and implemented in key applications

Rational recommends the following:

IBM Rational RequisitePro® provides use-case management capabilities that enable you to trace the service definition to the business process definition to the application requirements, so you can identify coverage gaps and understand the impact of changes to service definitions, processes, or applications.

IBM Rational Software Architect for WebSphere Software facilitates communication and collaboration to help you innovate and accelerate delivery of your software development projects.

If you need to enforce sound design and development principles for maximum asset reuse and reliability, Rational recommends the following:

IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, an Eclipse-based IDE helps you rapidly design, develop, assemble, test, profile, and deploy high quality Java™/J2EE™, Portal, Web, Web services, and SOA applications.

IBM Rational Business Developer provides a powerful workbench for Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) development, surfacing CICS transactions and COBOL processes as SOA services, allowing you to reuse existing assets within your SOA.

If you need to:

• Verify software builds and document the exact software versions that are deployed

• Manage quality across the SOA delivery lifecycle

Rational recommends the following:

IBM Rational Tester for SOA Quality provides automated, data-driven regression and functional testing for atomic and composite services.

IBM Rational Performance Extension for SOA Quality validates the reliability and performance of atomic or composition services with a flexible test scheduler that specifies the different groups of consumers and the activities and usage patterns of each group.

IBM Rational Build Forge™ automates build and release management across multiple projects, reducing errors that delay downstream testing and deployment activities by enabling you to build a service or composite application.

IBM WebSphere Integration Developer and Runtime automates service assembly and deployment of composite applications. All components are assembled together into the final, working SOA solution, tested, and deployed into production.

IBM Rational Functional Tester enables you to manage composite application test scenarios across geographically distributed teams.

IBM Rational Performance Tester helps you validate the scalability and reliability of complex applications before deployment.

With IBM Rational® service lifecycle management solutions, you can automate enforcement of your SOA governance model. As depicted in the graphic below, you can embed established procedures, controls, and decision rights into the processes that manage your lifecycle of service assets and resources.

The IBM solution is a comprehensive family of products that bridges technologies, functions, geographies, and development environments. Capabilities include process and portfolio management, change and release management, quality management, and architecture management.

Players at every step of software and systems delivery—from the business analysts to the architects to the developers to the testers to the operations team—can validate that the services and composite applications they are modeling, assembling, deploying, and managing are aligned with the stated business needs of the enterprise.

It is important to note that the SOA governance framework is not static. Feedback from service lifecycle management helps you refine SOA governance policies and procedures for continual process improvement