Requirements Modelling and Specification for Service Oriented Architecture

Chapter 1. Principles of SOA

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1953)

Computer systems are critical for modern, increasingly global businesses. These organizations continually strive for shorter time to market and to lower the cost of developing and maintaining computer applications to support their operations. However, according to regular reports from the Standish Group between the mid-1990s and the present day, around two thirds of large US projects fail, either through cancellation, overrunning their budgets massively, delivering a product that is never put into production or requiring major rework as soon as delivered. Outright project failures account for 15% of all projects, a vast improvement over the 31% failure rate reported in the first survey in 1994 but still a grim fact. On top of this, projects that were over time, over budget or lacking critical features and requirements totalled 51% of all projects in the 2004 survey. It is not incredible to extrapolate these scandalous figures to other parts of the world. What is harder to believe is that our industry, and the people in it, can remain insouciant in the face of such a shameful situation. Clearly we should be doing something differently.