Even though everyone claims the concept of a service-oriented architecture has been around for years, it’s probably too early to offer a real measurement of how the approach is doing, since many projects are still in the early stages. A study by Nucleus Research highlights the perceived lack of ROI, but I’m more interested in the social conflicts SOA brings out.
For example, the survey author notes that “Developers often view themselves as creators of code and applications and shun SOA because it forces them to reuse code generated by others.” It’s strange no one picked up on this idea until now: that programming is not just the IT equivalent of factory grunt work, at least not to the people actually churning out the code.It's great that developers take pride in their work, but if they're put off by code reuse because they think the software programmed by others will ruin what they've done, IT managers may find themselves having to referee a whole new kind of fight. The Nucleus report includes a number of other interesting SOA challenges, including the pricey extras that early adopters are only now realizing they need to make this thing work.
