SOA in Variability-Intensive Environments: Pitfalls and Best Practices

Software solution providers face numerous pitfalls when using standardized SOA-based solutions. One cause is variability between customer organizations—for example, variability occurs in local e-government because of municipalities’ autonomy when it comes to implementing national laws. This autonomy results in variations in business processes, which then cause variability in the information systems that implement them. This article presents pitfalls the authors observed in Dutch e-government, an example of a variability-intensive environment. They also present best practices that help deal with these pitfalls and organize them in an architecture pattern. Applying the pattern at more than 20 Dutch municipalities led to successful SOA implementations. Because such pitfalls are not just applicable to e-government, the proposed pattern can also be applied to other domains.