D8.2 The risk and cost impacts of inadequate infrastructure for Service Oriented Architecture Testing

The aim of D8.2 is twofold:

  1. specify  the  model,  the  variables  and  the  metric  that  will  be  used  to  assess  the  socio-economic-benefits generated by the use of MIDAS;
  2. provide a description of the current testing procedures used, the effort devoted and the  cost borne by the SOA providers in absence of an automated SOA testing infrastructure, in order to provide a base-line to be further compared with the future scenario of MIDAS use.

More in detail, D8.2 identifies three main categories of stakeholders impacted by MIDAS:

  1. the SOA providers
  2. the SOA buyers
  3. the society as a whole

With reference to the SOA providers, impacts can be measured by comparing, in the ex-ante and ex-post scenario, the labor costs (e.g. computer scientists, software engineers, computer
programmers  etc.) and the capital  costs (hardware  and  software)  borne  during  the  SOA  pre-release internal testing and “beta” testing phases, and during the SOA installation and post-sale
phases.

In addition to this, other “social attributes” linked to the changing in working routines and company internal organization, human resources profiles/skills and company reputation are also affected by the advent of MIDAS.

With reference to the SOA buyers, impacts can be measured by comparing, in the ex-ante and the ex-post situation: a) the costs (time, labor and capital) spent before the purchase of a SOA, during the SOA installation phase and after its introduction into the business, according to the number of bugs expected and/or found; b) the profits loss due to SOA malfunctioning, whose probability is correlated with the number of bugs remaining in the SOA after it is shipped to the final client.

In addition to this, other “social attributes” linked to the changing in working routines and company internal organization, to the company reputation, and to the collaboration with other companies and/or other stakeholders are also affected by the advent of MIDAS.

In addition to the more general impacts (and variables) identified, according to the sector in which a SOA is used, it is expected that other different types of benefits may be experienced either by the SOA buyers and by the society as a whole by the introduction of a better SOA testing infrastructure. Therefore, with reference to the two sectors involved in MIDAS pilot action, e- health and supply chain management, the D8.2 provides also a snapshot of the main variables that will be considered in our evaluation.

In the case of e-health, for example, the impacts brought by the use of MIDAS may be a higher quality care, a higher percentage of reduction in medical errors, fewer duplicate treatments and tests etc, while in the case of the supply management sector, the impacts may be a higher adaptivity of firms, a more efficient planning horizons, a reduction of stock-outs etc.

Finally, in order to describe the current scenario characterized by the absence of an automated SOA testing infrastructure, the D 8.2 shows the results of a survey which has been addressed to 3 SOA providers engaged in MIDAS pilot action. The main results of such survey are that all the interviewed firms agreed that improved infrastructure could reduce testing costs and accelerate the time to market for their products.

The interviewed companies also indicated that in the current environment, SOA testing is still more of an art than a science, and this is also demonstrated by the fact that some companies
are used not to perform any kind of testing on their produced SOA.

Another important information extracted by the survey is that the current testing procedures, effort and cost are very variegated, and differ according to the size of the firm, to the
kind of purpose pursued (e.g. research/ commerce), and to their internal organizational structure.

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