Lifecycle Management

One of the 3 fundamental governance types identified by Gartner as part of integrated SOA governance, lifecycle governance provides a mechanism for managing services, their associated metadata, and other governed assets through the various stages of their lifecycle.

SOA Software’s Workbench provides a comprehensive SOA lifecycle governance solution, and extends it adding powerful governance automation capabilities.  Governance automation minimizes the overhead associated with governance processes, and turns governance from a painful workload into a productivity tool.

Key elements in a lifecycle governance automation solution are:

• Lifecycle management workflow - Lifecycle governance centers around the processes involved in promoting and demoting services between lifecycle stages.  Most enterprises will have their own defined SDLC and will need to model this using their SOA lifecycle governance system.  This will involve customized lifecycle stages, approval requirements, notification requirements, policy validation requirements, and many other elements.
• Compliance policy validation - One of the important decision points in the lifecycle workflow is an asset’s compliance with defined policies.  For example an organization might require that a service have a design document, a description, be properly categorized, and have a defined business case before it can be promoted from the design stage to the development stage of the lifecycle.  The SOA lifecycle governance automation system needs to provide an easy way to define and manage compliance policies and associate these policies with lifecycle stages, categories, and other taxonomy or folksonomy structures and types.
• Change management notification- Change management notification addresses a couple of different issues.  Clearly any workflow system worth its salt has to include a notification model so that submitters and approvers know that action is required, or that a state change has occurred.  Also, in SOA governance, there is likely to be a varied constituency interested in the state and stages changes of assets.  A simple example is that the group of consumers using a service in production will want to know that there is a new version of the service available and that the current version will be deprecated within a defined timeframe.
• Lifecycle stage separation - Depending on the nature of the process and the requirements of the various lifecycle stages there are different ways of separating the stages.  Some organizations will want to leverage a single registry/repository instance using object-based security to ensure that only users in authorized roles can see assets at various stages of their lifecycle.  Other organizations will want to ensure physical separation between assets in different lifecycle stages.  The emerging best practice is a mixed mode approach using a single registry/repository instance for early lifecycle stages where there is considerable fluidity in lifecycle stage, with physically separate instances for later lifecycle stages to ensure strong security.