This document outlines the key stages of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) project lifecycle: 1. Planning stages include SOA Adoption Planning to determine scope, timeline, funding and governance models. 2. Service Inventory Analysis identifies existing services across business units. 3. Later stages involve modeling services (Service-Oriented Analysis), designing service contracts (Service-Oriented Design), developing service logic, deploying services, and monitoring service usage.

1. SOA Project Fundamentals

2. Project and Lifecycle Stages
• The following represent common and primary
stages (or phases) related to SOA projects and the
overall service lifecycle:
• SOA Adoption Planning
• Service Inventory Analysis
• Service-Oriented Analysis (Service Modeling)
• Service-Oriented Design (Service Contract)

3. • Service Logic Design
• Service Development
• Service Testing
• Service Deployment and Maintenance
• Service Usage and Monitoring
• Service Discovery
• Service Versioning and Retirement

4. SOA Adoption Planning
• It is during this initial stage that foundational
planning decisions are made. These decisions will
shape the entire project, which is why this is
considered a critical stage that may require
separately allocated funding and time in order to
carry out significant studies required to assess
and determine a range of factors, including:
• scope of planned service inventory and the
ultimate target state

5. • milestones representing intermediate target
states
• timeline for the completion of milestones and
the overall adoption effort
• available funding and suitable funding model
• governance system
• management system
• methodology

6. Service Inventory Analysis
• A service inventory represents a collection of
independently standardized, owned, and
governed services. The scope of a service
inventory is expected to be meaningfully
"cross-silo," which generally implies that it
encompasses multiple business processes or
operational areas within an organization.

7. Service-Oriented Analysis (Service
Modeling)
• Service-Oriented Analysis represents one of
the early stages in an SOA initiative and the
first phase in the service delivery cycle. It is a
process that begins with preparatory
information gathering steps that are
completed in support of a service modeling a
sub-process that results in the creation of
conceptual service candidates, service
capability candidates, and service composition
candidates

8. Service-Oriented Design (Service
Contract)
• The Service-Oriented Design phase represents a
service delivery lifecycle stage dedicated to
producing service contracts in support of the
well-established "contract-first" approach to
software development.
• The typical starting point for the Service-Oriented
Design process is a service candidate that was
produced as a result of completing all required
iterations of the Service-Oriented Analysis
process

9. Service Logic Design
• By preceding the design of service logic with
the Service-Oriented Design process, the
service contract is established and finalized
prior to the underlying service architecture
and the logic that will be responsible for
carrying out the functionality expressed in the
service contract.

10. Service Development
• After all design specifications have been
completed, the actual programming of the
service can begin. Because the service
architecture will already have been well-
defined as a result of the previous stages and
the involvement of custom design standards,
service developers will generally have clear
direction as to how to build the various parts
of the service architecture.