Services have business value

When you are on a project which is about evolving a set of services from an existing application, or building from scratch, there is always a lot of talk on the architecture and service governance aspects.

But if you are a Business Analyst on this piece of work, and you are asked to write stories for these services, you will wonder.. "well how can we showcase just services ?". If you have never done this before, you might even conclude that writing stories without a consumer of the service is not such a good idea. A lot of Agilists might argue that having a services story is a bad user story.

This happens because the fact that "Each Service has business value" does not become very apparent. If you look at Amazon WebServices it becomes immediately evident that each of the services have a set of features which can be sold to customers.

Services are a reality in today's world on the web, and people make money by selling services. A story which builds a service to search a book based on ISBN has business value. It does not need to have a pretty front end consumer for you to write a good user story. A temporary client/UI would be sufficient or maybe even functional tests/specs. It is still a good user story. This essence needs to be spread across the entire team, so that BAs and Devs are on the same page on "Good User Stories" for this kind of project.

Both BAs and QAs have to embrace this along with the developers on the team, and look at ways to apply Agile principles considering this, rather than being dogmatic in their approach towards Agile and SOA.

How do we do both SOA and Agile in a big enterprise ?

The project I am working on currently is a big enterprise application, mostly structured around the SOA model. Since we evolved a legacy code base, the service boundaries have just started to become crisp and clear. We are slowly starting to think of certain teams in the project owning a set of services, and also deciding on service contracts as a norm.

I am now starting to wonder how this model is going to work with Agile teams.

* Will this force us to do Big Design Upfront ? (BDUF)
* Will this force us to have service level teams ?
* How can we write good user stories (which are testable and showcaseable) for service level teams ?
* How can we structure the teams when we have multiple consumers (teams?) for one service ?
* Will this force developers to communicate using service contracts and documents more than unit tests?
* If we try to encourage cross functional teams, will it put a lot of stress on resourcing, with the need of shuffling people around a lot ?

I do not have answers to any of these yet, and a quick look at the Agile community , also does not give me any concrete answers.