A recent ZDNet Asia article has caught my attention:

The article begins by noting that “[SOA] is a design approach where individual business services, such as authenticating networks or pulling up customer information, are used in different applications”. The aims of this approach are to make the organisation’s systems more cost-effective and responsive.

One architect is quoted as saying that they measure “the success of its SOA project by how much software reuse is happening and how quickly the company can offer services to customers”.

Ever since I had a discussion with Ashley McNeile at SPA 2005 after I’d participated in his SOA session I’ve hypothesised that the Software Product Line approach could contribute to SOA. This was further reinforced after reading a couple of CBDI Forum articles on “Applying Product Line Techniques to SOA” earlier this year (membership required to access articles), and now in reading this ZDNet article.

However, there is a lot of hype around SOA, and I do find it very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’d be interested to hear from anyone working in this area to try and validate the hypothesis that Software Product Line engineering techniques can help realize Service Oriented Architectures.