SOA Content and Technical Governance using AIA Foundation Pack

In an enterprise application integration scenario, SOA Governance is about visibility and control during the entire service lifecycle; including design time, where this boils down to maximizing the investments made in building the service portfolio to ensure that it provides for interoperability, reusability and extensibility.

AIA Foundation Pack Tenets

The AIA Foundation Pack allows you to satisfy these criteria using content and technical level governance.

Content level governance – the key to Interoperability and Reusability

The AIA Foundation Pack provides content level governance at all the abstraction layers. The Enterprise Business Objects (EBO) and Enterprise Business Services (EBS) development go through thorough scrutiny with Subject Matter Experts (SME) from each of the Oracle application areas (yes, including Fusion applications) to come up with a rationalized object model. It then undergoes a standardization pass, which ensures adherence to standards such as UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specifications (CCTS) and XML Naming and Design Rules (NDR).

AIA EBO Development Methodology

This level of governance renders the common object and services model instantly relevant as opposed to a theoretical model that is hard to implement, since it has been already vetted for mapping against most of the Oracle applications logical data models as part of the rationalization process.

Data models aside, the reason why the rationalization was even initiated in the first place is due to a compelling need at the business process level. The reference process models supplied with the Foundation Pack also allow you to drill down from the lowest levels of the process models right into the associated canonical objects and services. This allows you to now take your pick of the application capability that can best satisfy the business task at hand. Since the canonical layer has just “virtualized” your application capabilities, so you can start with the business problem instead of the constraints of the technology. This level of content governance not only relieves you from having to tackle with the typical SOA governance issues of having to decide on the right-sized service granularity, but it also creates a common platform for business and IT stakeholders to collaborate on i.e. shared semantics and a business process approach to integrations.

The content level governance just does not stop here, but goes deep into the implementation. Once the canonical objects are mapped to the actual application interfaces (Web Services, Component Interfaces, Interface Tables, APIs etc), these mappings can be then viewed using the XSLT Mapping Analyzer (XMAN) utility which analyzes the XSL maps and presents a tabular view of the EBO – Application mapping.

 

AIA XSL Mapping Analyzer (XMAN) Report

In the case of Oracle AIA PIPs, custom extensions to the Oracle provided maps are highlighted which allows for easier identification during upgrades.  In addition, map reports from existing Oracle PIP assets can be viewed to assist in and accelerate custom Application Business Connector Service (ABCS) development as well as ensure that your custom maps are in accordance with the Oracle best practices.

The tool can also be invaluable when comparing the same report from different transformations (potentially developed by different teams) to ensure that there are no mapping conflicts, which can be otherwise very difficult to detect.  (This is currently manual but in the process of being automated). More on the XMAN tool can be found in this post.

Technical level governance – the key to Extensibility and Reusability

With an ever-growing asset inventory of design patterns and programming guidelines, manual checking for compliance to the AIA Integration Developers Guides standards checklist can get a little tedious.

AIA PIP Auditor Summary Report

PIP Auditor is a tool designed to enhance productivity and improve the quality of the services by checking your AIA services for compliance to programming best practices and patterns found in the AIA Integration Developers Guide, as well as other industry best practices as appropriate. The report output is categorized per TOGAF standards and a compliance “score” is presented.

AIA PIP Auditor Detail Report

Developers can drill down into the problem areas and identify the areas to fix in order to achieve compliance. Violations can be drilled down into right down to the file level and where relevant, even down to the line/column number e.g. in the case of naming convention violations. The design of the tool is flexible enough to allow for incremental patching of new rules – more than 70 rules have already been implemented as part of an internal beta release, with more coming soon before we make it available on Metalink. More on the PIP Auditor tool can be found in this post.

There are a lot more productivity enhancing tools and utilities that are available as part of the AIA Foundation Pack, such as an Artifacts Generator and a Build Install Generator tools, which we will be discussing on this forum in future posts.

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