Capturing the Experience
So that all enterprises can benefit from the experience of early adopters of SOA, it's important that companies deploying SOA, companies providing SOA solutions, and companies providing tools communicate with each other. Participation in industry bodies and consortia can be an excellent way of doing that. Outside the commercial arena, free of the pressure to pick a product or make a sale, people can exchange ideas and discuss approaches to realizing SOA.

The Open Group is a vendor-neutral consortium whose vision is boundary-less information flow in and between organizations. It sees SOA as the prime architectural approach by which enterprises can realize that vision. Its SOA Working Group exists to develop and foster common understanding of SOA to facilitate alignment between the business and information technology communities. It does this by conducting a work program to produce definitions, analyses, recommendations, reference models, and standards to assist business and information technology professionals in and outside the Open Group to understand and adopt SOA. Participation in forums such as this helps people learn from others and capture common experience for the benefit of the wider community.

It's particularly important that anti-patterns are identified and described, and catalogued in a structured way. In the SOA Advanced Technology team at IBM, for example, an effort is under way to identify SOA anti-patterns from experiences with SOA customer engagements. The goals of this effort are, in addition to identifying the anti-patterns, to catalogue them for future reference, and to develop educational material on anti-patterns. And the practice of detecting anti-patterns at all stages of the SOA solution lifecycle is being enforced too.

Conclusion
SOA use is growing explosively. But when an enterprise uses any new approach, mistakes are likely, and SOA is no exception to this rule. For this reason, it's vital that the experience of the first adopters of SOA is captured for the benefit of all enterprises. Identification and documentation of anti-patterns - attractive apparent solutions that are known not to work - will help enterprises avoid mistakes and successfully implement SOA.

We hope that we have provided some useful thoughts on how to avoid known mistakes in a SOA project. Some of the most important lessons are:

• Be sure to include skills development in your plan.
• Plan for incremental releases, building on one another and testing as you go.
• Web Services are an important technology but, by themselves, they aren't SOA. SOA is an architectural approach first and foremost!
• Don't get trapped into thinking more services is a better solution. Having the right services is the better solution. Avoid anti-patterns like chatty services.
• Adding point-to-point connections doesn't help; look to the Enterprise Service Bus pattern as way to simplify your architecture.

These aren't the only lessons. There are many anti-patterns to avoid. We are continuing to do research in this area and plan to publish further articles on the topic and encourage you, the practitioners, to join in this work, and get involved with other people and organizations working on SOA.

Where To Learn More
The Open Group SOA Working Group provides a very active forum for staying abreast of recent SOA developments. The group intends its work to be highly accessible to participants at all levels. You can find out more about the Open Group SOA Working group at www.opengroup.org/projects/soa/.

Besides the SOA Working Group, there are many sources for pattern and anti-pattern information. Below we list some we believe will be particularly useful.

References
1.  Jonathan Adams, Srinivas Koushik, Guru Vasudeva, and George Galambos. Patterns for e-Business: A Strategy for Reuse. MC Press. 2001.

2.  D. Alur, J. Crupi, and D. Malks. Core J2EE Patterns: Best Practices and Design Strategies. Prentice Hall/Sun Microsystems Press. ISBN: 0130648841.

3.  B. Dudney, S. Asbury, J. Krozak, and K. Wittkopf. J2EE Anti-Patterns. Wiley Publications. ISBN: 0471146153.

4.  E. Gamma, R. Helm, R. Johnson, and J. Vlissides. Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Reading, Addison-Wesley. 1995.

5.  D. Hovemeyer and W. Pugh. "Finding Bugs is Easy."
www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/bugs/docs/findbugsPaper.pdf

6.  D. Reimer, E. Schonberg, K. Srinivas, H. Srinivasan, B. Alpern, R. D. Johnson, A. Kershenbaum, and L. Koved. SABER: Smart Analysis Based Error Reduction. In ISSTA. 2004.

7.  William J. Brown, Raphael C. Malveau, Hays W. "Skip" McCormick, and Thomas J. Mowbray. Anti-Patterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis. Paperback. March 20, 1998)

8.  Norbert Bieberstein, Sanjay Bose, Marc Fiammante, Keith Jones, and Rawn Shah. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Compass: Business Value, Planning, and Enterprise Roadmap. Developerworks. Hardcover. IBM Press

9.  Olaf Zimmermann, Mark R. Tomlinson, and Stefan Peuser. Perspectives on Web Services: Applying SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI to Real-World Projects. Springer Professional Computing. Hardcover. ISBN: 3540009140.

10.  Steve Jones. "SOA Anti-Patterns." CGI: http://www.infoq.com/articles/SOA-anti-patterns. Also check out Steve's blog @ http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/ Search for "anti-patterns" or "patterns."

11.  Ali Asranjani, Service-oriented modeling and architecture, How to identify, specify, and realize services for your SOA. IBM Developerworks. November 2004.
www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soa-design1/

12.  SOA Survey article, www.govtech.net/magazine/channel_story.php/100246

13.  "Growth in SOA and Web Services Implementation." SDA Asia. July 25, 2006.
www.sda-asia.com/sda/features/psecom,id,459,srn,2,nodeid,21,_language,Singapore.html

14. Jenny Ang, Luba Cherbakov, and Dr. Mamdouh Ibrahim. “SOA Antipatterns - The obstacles to the adoption and successful realization of service-oriented architecture.” 18 Nov 2005. IBM Developerworks: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-antipatterns/