Leading IT organizations are adopting service-oriented architectures (SOA) and outsourcing IT development in order to get more out of current investments, and to deliver new products and services to market faster and more efficiently. Yet, despite their original intent, many organizations are struggling with the reverse effect. Both SOA and outsourcing initiatives are creating new and unexpected quality control challenges that are causing projects to be delivered late and to exceed already tightening IT budgets.

This paper discusses how SOA, outsourcing and other recent IT trends towards more distributed development are introducing delays into the software development life cycle (SDLC). The paper also demonstrates how companies are leveraging IONA technologies and methodologies to overcome these challenges.