You can build a complex house of cards, but when you're finished, it's still a house of cards.

The same is true of service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications built without comprehensive quality assurance, says Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst, ZapThink LLC. If one of the primary goals of using the SOA approach is agility, it will fall apart if quality isn't built in to the entire application, he argues in a ZapThink white paper published this month titled, SOA Quality across the Service Lifecycle

"This core agility benefit of SOA collapses like a house of cards," he writes, "if the services or the applications that consume and compose them are of poor quality or behave in an unpredictable manner."