Pro wrestling legend Rowdy Roddy Piper immortalized the words “Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”

Now we at SearchSOA.com are asking you to do the same thing, sort of. It won’t involve wearing a kilt or smashing a coconut over anyone’s skull. We just want you to ask some good questions.

We’ve recently revamped our site experts roster and we’re looking to put them through their paces. The way it works is you ask a question and we send the question off to an expert to get you an answer. It’s a fairly illustrious list of folks:

• SOA standards and architecture - Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group
• SOA governance and BPM - Sri Nagabhirava, founder and chief architect nLeague Services
• SOA infrastructure - Dana Gardner, principal analyst Interarbor Solutions
• RIA and enterprise mashups - Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst ZapThink
• SOA testing and QA - Rami Jaamour, product manager of SOA solutions at Parasoft
• Data services - Larry Fulton, senior analyst at Forrester Research
• SOA development - Chris Haddad, vice president and service director at Burton Group

They’re already producing some top flight insight, like data integration best practices, where grid intersects SOA and the difference between WSDL 1.1 and 2.0. Yet good answers like that depend on good questions from the user community. We sift through heaping piles of “What’s the difference between an application server and a Web server?” (a perfectly legitimate question, but we answered it back in 2003) in order to get some of the top minds in the SOA space the best questions the user base can generate.

The process for submitting a question is simple. Just go to the topic where your question fits and click on “Pose a Question.” That will take you to a question submission form. After that, it’s as simple as typing in your query. Keep us busy. We like it that way.

I was talking with Wayne Ariola, Parasoft’s vice president of strategy and corporate development, last week about the concept of SOA quality. Parasoft’s been using the term “SOA quality” as part of the latest rollout of its SOAtest product, which now is able to query UDDI registries so that WSDL verification tests can be performed at the time they’re published.

Quality is a key element in software development and it should go without saying that the more business that gets pumped through Web services, the more important it will be to have a good QA process in place for those services. Noting that “lack of central visibility” is normal in the classic software development lifecyle, Ariola listed what he thinks are key elements in that SOA quality process.

1. SOA necessitates centralization, a role played by the registry/repository. He argued that stovepipes become inevitable without it.

2. A health check needs to be performed to make sure the asset meets the requirements. Among the potential requirements, he highlighted defining the asset’s consistency and the boundaries for its reuse.

3. You need a convenient way to emulate the service. Taking down a component could cause unintended chaos once it’s being leveraged in multiple places. Testing and changes are best handled in the virtual arena in order to avoid that trap.

4. If a component or service is going to reused, the testing expectations need to be made readily available so that different orchestration scenarios can be vetted. In general the testing environment should be as open and accessible as possible.
5. Make sure you fully and accurately define your SLAs, future users of that service will need to understand the true behavior expectations behind it.

6. Be prepared to do some sort of compliance monitoring in order to make sure your services are being properly used.