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SOA changes the rules for the application lifecycle from design, through development, testing, deployment and beyond.  As an architect, you are probably the driving force in making SOA successful – and reaching the business agility goals of your organization. Because SOA systems often include services that are shared across multiple applications, your work can be more complex.

With services and SOAs you have to ensure interoperability, performance and functionality. The systems being built can no longer be designed, built and tested in a traditional controlled fashion. Quality needs to be driven at each step of the SOA lifecycle. At each lifecycle stage, SOA governance policies, performance and functionality must be validated to conform to specifications. You need tools that support your SOA efforts, enabling you to collaborate across all functions of team, easily achieve project goals at each stage, make your SOA project successful, and realize agility for your business.

SOAPscope Architect is a Web services testing and SOA Quality Management platform with an integrated set of tools for Web services testing, policy rules authoring, design-time support, prototyping, change-time and run-time support. It provides the ability to establish SOA design standards by easily combining codified industry policy sets with customized organizational best practices.

SOAPscope Architect enables users to enforce compliance at design and development time. Contracts are validated up front, long before they could break at run-time.  By combining industry policy sets (e.g. WS-I Basic Profile) with customized organizational best practices, SOAPscope Architect helps architects and developers establish and enforce design standards, and drive SOA quality by:

SOAPscope Architect Features

SOAPscope Architect 6.2 allows architects and developers to continuously validate WSDL contracts to ensure quality, trust and compliance and enable SOA team members to build better services that meet interoperability goals.  Among the features of SOAPscope Architect are:  

Policy Rules Authoring

What it does: Policy rules authoring enables a company to translate best practices used by the industry and their company into rules that can be validated automatically as service designers create new services. Contracts are validated up front, long before they could break at run-time.

Why you need it: Allows organizations to codify and setup rules and best practices that can be enforced throughout the software development lifecycle.  It allows teams to validate - early and often - that their services are meeting those policies to avoid interoperability or policy compliance problems, improving business agility.

PDF Report Output for Policy Check Enhancements 

What it does:  The Policy Check feature in SOAPscope Architect provides validation of the WSDL, XML schemas and SOAP messages. New in version 6.2, users are able to capture that output in a durable PDF report and share it with others - or store it their organization’s external repository - giving everyone on the team a view into policy issues and policy compliance.

Why you need it:  PDF reports provide a valuable asset and a mechanism for anyone on the team to easily review policy violations or prove policy compliance. Developers and consumers can invoke services and provide high quality feedback about technical policy assertions for WSDL, XML Schema and SOAP Messages via a PDF report. In addition, testers can validate a WSDL as part of a technical governance process and store the PDF report in your organization’s external repository for a traceable audit.

Invoke/Resend

What it does: SOAPscope Architect enables you to test your Web services by dynamically creating a request message using the SOAPscope UI, sending that request message to a server, and viewing the response. Resend enables you to change the data being sent in a message and send it again to see the effect of your change.

Why you need it: Invoke and Resend capabilities allow you to send messages and view the responses to test a service method. You can then resend that message multiple times while making small changes. Invoke and Resend make service and SOA testing

Named Endpoints

What it does: Invoke and Resend now provides the ability to Name WSDL Endpoints, so that you can test against the WSDL that you want to test, rather than the WSDL in production.  

Why you need it: The ability to set Named Endpoints saves time, improves test accuracy, and makes it easy to test against specific WSDLs. 

Service Simulation 

What it does: SOAPscope Architect lets you easily create service simulations, without coding, by capturing SOAP messages and adding them to a simulation. Simulations can also be created directly from a WSDL utilizing powerful SOAPscope invoke forms.

Why you need it: Service simulations can serve as a prototype of non-existent services, can stand-in for unavailable services, or serve as a 'mock service' for testing purposes.

Multiple Workspace Integration

What it does:  SOAPscope Architect offers the ability to work within, and switch between, multiple Mindreef Shared Workspaces(TM)

Why you need it: Allows you to manage multiple workspaces simultaneously, and to organize those workspaces within a folder hierarchy. You only need to import or export a workspace at the point where you are ready to share your work with others. Having the ability to work on multiple workspaces will let you work with much greater efficiency by keeping all of your information readily available, any time you need it.

Mindreef Pseudocode^TM

What it does: Pseudocode provide easy viewing, comprehension and modification of services, WSDL and SOAP messages without the need to know XML.

Why you need it:  Pseudocode allows anyone on the project team – from the business analyst to the tester - to understand what a service is doing, without requiring knowledge of XML. With Pseudocode you see and work in raw XML code only when you want to.

Contract Documentation

What it does: SOAPscope Architect generates a Pseudocode view of WSDL contracts as well as a whole JAVADOC style documentation for the contract.

Why you need it: Reuse of Web services not only depends on finding existing services, but also on fully understanding those services. SOAPscope Tester allows you to get a clear and thorough linked visualization of a WSDL contract.

Scenario Testing 

What it does: When you create a new message, SOAPscope Architect automatically creates a new action based on the message and adds that action to a list of actions. SOAPscope Architect allows you to replay these lists of actions to verify that responses match existing benchmarks. Test scenario actions can be set to expect a variable, and the results view will display the results for each row of the data binding. New in 6.2:  Users can deliver well-tested services faster with automated testing using "complex assertions." Assertion Operators other than "=" to compare expected values with actual test response values to further automate functional and performance testing. 

Why you need it: Scenario Test actions provide a simple, but reproducible way to test Web services without using complicated or expensive testing tools. Scenario Testing allows you to redirect playback scripts to different end points, such as a test server, developer debug environment, or production servers. You can also customize Scenario Test actions to use variables to thread data from one action to another. Scenario Test actions can also automatically verify that responses match existing benchmarks.