The SOA Lifecycle is a method of breaking work efforts into discrete units. Within each area, we are able to look at the work performed and the deliverables to determine if they conform with the Governance criteria. 

The Lifecycle is divided into several phases and governance is applied within each phase:

Governance in the Service Lifecycle focuses on the use of guiding principles or policies to help workers know if they are doing the right things. The following is an abbreviated description of the topics covered in each guide.

Service Investigation Guide

• Are you managing your services as a portfolio of assets?
• Is there a clear taxonomy of services?
• Are services registered and discovered?
• Is proper ROI analysis determined?

Service Analysis Guide

• Are complete service requirements gathered?
• Use of Top-Down Analysis?
• Use of Bottom-Up Analysis?
• Use of Meet-in-the-Middle Analysis?

Service Design Guide

• Are services & operations designed with proper granularity?
• Are services described in the proper formats (WSDL, etc.)?
• Are non-functional attributes factored out of the service interface?
• Are global data types and canonical formats being used?

Service Construction Giude

• Contract First or Code First?
• Platform specific policies (Java, .Net, etc.)
• Code generation from WSDL

Service Integration & Test

• Service Testing Plans
• Guidelines for unit testing services/operations
• Capacity / performance testing guidelines

Service Release

• Deployment plans
• Staging & test services
• Service registrations & documentation

Service Operation

• SLA identification and measurement
• Activity reporting
• Capacity forecasting
• Issue resolution

Service Consumption

• Consumer registration guidelines
• Mediation and virtualization policies
• Capacity / performance testing guidelines

Service Evolution

• Notification of changes to consumers
• Versioning guidelines
• Service forking & parallel instances
• Sunsetting services
• Request for change