WebLayers Center 5.0 will help reduce the costly developer errors that result from policy violations, provide greater transparency into business processes, and extend the value of existing technology investments throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC).
Along with extended support for an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE), key new features in WebLayers Center 5.0 automated SOA governance software include: federated, active policy management, distributed automated governors, a comprehensive conformance center, and a dynamic dashboard. WebLayers Center 5.0’s federated policy management features enables a software architect or software developer to centralize policy management and distribute policy enforcement to support automated governance at every point in the infrastructure and across all platforms throughout the SDLC.
These capabilities are provided through the new WebLayers Center distributed governors that deliver consistent policy management for online and offline development efforts. Completely self-contained in the infrastructure, a distributed governor includes its own policy engine and a governor to ensure governance policies are managed throughout the SDLC and distributed from a central location while being applied appropriately in the right context. "SOA in and of itself denotes a federated and distributed architecture; therefore, one of the most essential principles of governance is enforcement of policies and processes," said L. Frank Kenney, research director, Gartner, Inc. "Having distributed governance is going to be a critical first step in building a distributed-centric environment." Instead of time consuming and error prone manual review processes or a simplistic on/off approach to SOA governance, WebLayers’s intelligent automated governors allow a software developer and architect to more easily mitigate I.T. risks by applying rules-based logic to governance and instantly run policies throughout the different, critical stages in the SDLC. Since the governors execute governance based on technology guidelines and business rules, organizations are assured that software applications and application development processes executed by a software developer reflect a company’s overarching business goals. For example, policy failures may indicate that specific software code has a low security score. The intelligent automated governors would identify all of the artifacts throughout the infrastructure that are related to that low score and alert the software developer and SOA architect to where the code violates development policies or business rules. From there, WebLayers Center guides the software developer on how to address the issues regardless of where or in what phase they appear in the SDLC. This helps to reduce overall software development errors, decrease learning curves, and accelerate the return on SOA investments. Using the WebLayers enhanced integration with the Eclipse-based IDE, a software developer can more easily identify errors and make changes directly to the code without having to exit their development environment. Taking these capabilities further, WebLayers Center now includes an auto correct feature that not only detects software development policy errors throughout the SDLC but also automatically corrects the violations. This results in additional time saved by allowing developers to focus solely on addressing errors as opposed to reviewing entire applications.
"Based on its ability to proactively identify and address policy violations in the SDLC before they negatively affect the way a business is run, governance is transforming from an option to a necessity," said John Favazza, vice president of engineering, WebLayers. "This necessity is due to the realization that the cost of fixing software code after it’s been deployed can be 50-200 times higher than if the issues were addressed as the code was being written by the software developer. WebLayers Center 5.0 mitigates these risks and reduces unnecessary development costs resulting in greater cost efficiencies for our customers." WebLayers' new node director can instantly capture a snapshot of each governance point within the enterprise. This allows a manager to instantly distribute recommended policies to any governed system including each developer's desktop for greater knowledge sharing and time savings throughout the SDLC. Also, through the SOA governance software’s consistent versioning and enforcement of policies, changes only need to be made once and are executed throughout the entire infrastructure. The WebLayers Center conformance center allows a software developer to see the results of policy tests on code and try out test case scenarios to gauge the impact of a policy change on the infrastructure as well as the SDLC before it’s deployed. The WebLayers Center dashboard gives SOA architects and business managers reporting capabilities that provide greater visibility into the policy compliance level of projects and allows them to assess the impact of SOA governance on the organization.
