Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), incorporating methods for Web services to communicate dynamically, promises to significantly improve organizational operating efficiency, change the way companies conduct business, and even alter the competitive landscape. However, Service-Oriented Architecture is a strategy rather than an objective, and, like any strategy, it is of no value unless it is implemented. With illustrations from companies who today are using SOA to transform their organizations, Sharon Fay shares current practices for exposing Web services and XML to internal development teams, outsourced development, external trading partners, and customers. Learn why reuse is a key method for supporting integration of SOA implementations and how it is being accomplished. Take away a set of metrics that you can use to measure the level of SOA adoption, development productivity gains, and organizational agility.

Usability testing of early GUI designs with paper prototypes validates that you are building the right applications for your customers. This low-cost, high-impact practice allows you to rapidly evolve the GUI interface and find many design bugs early in the development process before coding begins. With this process, you can get external customers and internal users actively involved in designing and testing the GUI with tools they can easily manipulate. Based on project experiences at The MathWorks, Inc., you will learn how to move from the paper prototype to a coded GUI and a set of automated tests. In addition, you will learn to develop user documentation while working back and forth between the GUI and the test plan to clarify design choices.

• Involving everyone in GUI design early in the project
• User tasks and scenarios as the basis for GUI validation

Design patterns are powerful tools when understood and employed properly. Combining design patterns and test-driven development (TDD) using a set of design principles will achieve higher productivity and quality than either practice alone. With numerous code snippets as examples, Thirumalesh Bhat describes the design principles and resulting patterns that have been extracted from TDD practices at Microsoft. Learn more about these design principles: commonality/variability analysis, open/closed principle, high cohesion, low coupling, prototyping, designing for current features, single point of maintenance, refactoring, unit testing, testability, and cost/benefit analysis. Adapt and apply these principles and design patterns to your TDD projects for the same benefits.

• Fundamental principles of design patterns
• Test-driven development (TDD) and refactoring

Use cases are a wonderfully simple concept: document a system's functional requirements by writing down scenarios about how using it delivers value to its actors. However, writing effective use cases is more difficult than expected because you frequently must deal with difficult questions, such as: scope, level of detail needed for different people and projects, how to describe external interfaces, stored data, and more. You need a source of objective criteria to judge use case quality and effectiveness. Fill this critical information gap with a pattern language that provides simple, elegant, and proven solutions to common problems in use case development. Take away these use case patterns and profit from the knowledge and experience of other successful use case writers. And develop a new vocabulary for describing the properties of quality use cases.

• The "signs of quality" and properties of a good use case