Sample Test 664 - SOA Fundamentals (IBM Certified SOA Associate)

Section 1 - The Value of SOA (13%)

A. Identify business functions where SOA can improve competitiveness and productivity.
B. Identify the SOA factors that make businesses more agile.
C. Realize the opportunity costs of not adopting SOA.
D. Identify situations where SOA does not provide the desired value.

Total Question : 7

1. The business function that an SOA can impact the most in order to improve competitiveness and productivity is one that:

o is already defined as a web service.

o is to be provided to customers globally.
o has a homogeneous IT environment.
o has subsecond response time constraints.

2. How can SOA provide business agility?

o The IT infrastructure approach provided by SOA recommended having multiple services for the same function.
o The IT infrastructure approach provided by SOA requires no change to meet the business needs.
o The IT infrastructure can easily be adapted to meet business needs.
o The responsibility of modifications to the IT infrastructure is given to a single authority to speed up the modifications.

3. What will cost more if SOA is not adopted?

o Product deployment time is saved.

o Web Services cannot be exposed.
o Money is saved because SOA is a very expensive solution.
o Department and inter-company mergers are more difficult.

4. What are two benefits of adopting SOA?

o Easier to change a business partner.

o Easier to attain a customer point-to-point integration.
o Better alignment between business and IT department.
o Limitations on the total number of communication mechanisms to manage.
o Use of single platform environment.

5. A furniture store lets the customers view its product catalogue online as a PDF file or as a printed copy in store. Customers pay
for an item in-store or on the phone. The store wants to enable online payment as well. The store has a supplier which is notified of
purchases so it can ship the item(s). The supplier is not expected to change in the future. The notification and shipment processes
are highly optimized and stable. If the company adopts SOA, which business function will most improve competitiveness and
productivity?

o View catalogue
o Purchase item
o Notify shipper of purchase
o Ship item

6. Which three serve as catalysts in a SOA to provide business agility?

(Choose three)

o Reusable services.
o Limitations on total numbers of services.
o Ability to enlarge the operation and scope of the services
o Use of J2EE.
o Single-platform IT environment.
o Ability to replace service providers

7. In which two situations does SOA have the potential to be significantly beneficial?

o When real time performance is critical.

o In a heterogeneous IT environment.
o When there is only a few reasons for future changes to the system under consideration.
o When applications accessing a system are geographically spread out.
o In a homogeneous IT environment.
Section 2 - SOA Concepts (24%)

A. Define the concept of a service in SOA.

B. Describe loose coupling in SOA.
C. Describe the roles that XML plays in SOA (SOAP, WSDL, ebXML).
D. Describe the role of the registry in service publishing and discovery.
E. Explain what a business process is in the context of SOA.
F. Explain what a transaction is in the context of SOA.
G. Determine the role that technology standards (WS-Security, BPEL4WS, WS-I) play in SOA.

Total Question : 13

8. Which technology standard provides a method of documenting the function of a service, taxonomy for classifying the service,
and a search facility for finding a service?

o SOAP
o WSDL
o UDDI
o XML

9. What is the effect of using XML in an SOA?

o The enterprise service bus (ESB) mediates during service invocation.

o Web services are invoked.
o Business processes are modeled.
o The service repository provides persistence.

10. In the context of a business process in SOA, which statement most accurately describes what a transaction is?

o Transactions are reliable updates via queued writes from the service requestor using message-oriented middleware.
o The relevant standards as related to SOA and transactions are WS-Coordination, WS-AtomicTransaction and WS-
BusinessActivity.
o During the execution of service invocations, transactions represent the activity in your service workflow.
o The WS-Coordination framework enables existing transaction processing, workflow, and other systems for coordination to
hide their
proprietary protocols and to operate in a heterogeneous environment

11. Which statement is the most accurate definition of loose-coupling in SOA?

o Services that use the SOA WS-* standards can communicate via XML messaging across different platforms.
o Service interfaces can change without affecting service consumers.
o Protocol and format of messaging can change without affecting the service contract.
o Composite services can be built and reconfigured from other services that may be use disparate technologies.

12. What are the characteristics of a business service?

(Choose two)

o Tightly coupled.
o Interface based.
o Loosely cohesive.
o Stateless.
o Platform bound.

13. A Business Analyst identifies a set of key business services. How could an SOA Architect initially use this information?

o Arrange the business services into a sequence of business components.

o Choreograph the business services to carry out a business process.
o Create software requirements to automate the business services.
o Use a Web Service Registry to automate the business services.

14. Which three are XML based?

o WSDL
o SOAP
o ESB
o BPEL
o EAI
o RPC
15. Which statement is the most accurate definition of a service?

o It is language and platform independent logic that can be invoked across a network as part of compound components.
o It is reusable, stateless business functionality that satisfies the needs of a wide variety of processes.
o It is a self-describing interface to reusable functionality and relies on the state of collaborating services.
o It is a unit of work in a registry that is available upon receipt of a SOAP message

16. Which standard is used to orchestrate services into business process?

o ESB
o BPEL
o WSDL
o WS-I

17. Which statement is the most accurate definition of loose-coupling in SOA?

o Services that use the SOA WS-* standards can communicate via XML messaging across different platforms.
o Service interfaces can change without affecting service consumers.
o Protocol and format of messaging can change without affecting the service contract.
o Composite services can be built and reconfigured from other services that may be use disparate technologies.

18. A widget company takes orders from customers, allows the customer to cancel an order and to view outstanding orders. Which
three services are the most effective services to identify?
(Choose 3)

o View order history for a customer

o List outstanding orders for a customer
o Order a widget
o Delete an order
o Search outstanding orders
o Cancel an order for a customer

19. What is an example of an expense department business process?

o A Web application deposits an expense reimbursement into an employee's bank account.

o An expense department holds a meeting about employee benefits, timeliness, and equal opportunity.
o A clerk receives an expense claim, validates the claim, and generates a reimbursement check.
o An employee submits an expense claim through an online Web application.

20. Which standard defines the interfaces to Web services?

o WSDL
o SOAP
o UDDI
o WS-I

Section 3 - Basic SOA Architecture (22%)

A. Describe a basic SOA architecture.

B. Describe the role of an enterprise service bus (ESB) in SOA.
C. Describe the role of Web services in building an SOA.
D. Describe choreography of business processes from services and human interactions.
E. Identify and explain the stages of the SOA lifecycle (model, assemble, deploy, manage).

Total Question : 12

21. What are the key components of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)?

o …
o Transport services, messaging services and mediation services.
o …
o …

22. Which role would typically create message flows, mediations and transformation on the enterprise serviced bus (ESB)?

o The Service Developer.

o The Interoperability Developer.
o The Service Governor.
 o The Integration Specialist.

23. The Model phase of an SOA life cycle deals with

(Choose two)

o What services need to be build.

o Service API transport issues.
o Platform specific issues.
o How services are to be built.
o Monitoring services from IT perspective.

24. A bank has individual services that perform specific tasks such as security, account verification, balance checking etc. The bank
wants to create another service that can help perform all these tasks in a single interface. The new service falls into which service
category?

o Composite service
o Hybrid service
o Utility service
o Wrapper service

25. Which statement most accurately describes SOA orchestration and choreography?

o It models how a service is realized and executed in the software implementation layer.
o It enables consumers to directly interact with lower level resource services and bypass mediation services.
o It manages interaction details of composing services and execution sequences.
o It represents the interaction between two atomic units of service process logic implementation.

26. In an SOA, what provides all the inter-connectivity capabilities required to leverage and use services implemented across the
entire architecture?

o Web services
o Java Messaging Services (JMS)
o Services integration platform
o Enterprise service bus (ESB)

27. What are components of web services architecture?

o Service requestor, service provider and service registry.

o …
o …
o …

28. What allows a service to be independent of the platform, language, or logic?

o A universal repository
o The service registry
o Componetization
o The service broker
o An interface

29. Which SOA life cycle phase deals with how service interface definitions can be derived from the business processes?

o Testing
o Assemble
o Model
o Manage

30. An online shopping cart application wants to use an SOA shipment processing service from another department. For the service
consumer, which two should be the most important concerns about the service provider during the model and assembly phases of
the SOA lifecycle?
(Choose 2)

o Platform of the service implementation

o Invocation patterns between the services
o Programming language of the service implementation
o Messaging data formats
o XSLT used by the service for transformation

31. Which three statements are the most accurate of the role of Web Services in an SOA?

o Web Services are required to implement an SOA.

o A Web Service is a software system identified by an URL, whose public interfaces and binding are defined and described by
using XML.
o Web Services are message oriented.
o Web Services are completely independent of Web Applications.
o Web Services are solely externally focused.
 o Web Services are cross-platform and cross-language.

32. Which statement is true about SOA Service Model?

o It enables consumers to interact with the services independent of the service implementation.
o It reflects the platform specific view of the services.
o It implements the complete Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements.
o It provides the implementation for resource and platform virtualization.

Section 4 - SOA Management (19%)

A. Explain the need for SOA governance.

B. Define SOA governance (SLA, roles and responsibilities, policies, critical success factors, and metrics).
C. Describe Quality of Service (QoS) compliance in SOA governance.
D. Explain the need for a distributed security model.
E. Identify the impact of changes to services in the SOA lifecycle.
F. Identify the role of the enterprise service bus (ESB) in SOA governance.

Total Questions: 10

33. Which two practices could appear within a mail-order corporation's SOA governance framework?
(Choose 2)

o Monitor order fulfillment employees' pay for alignment with regional averages.
o Stipulate who is allowed to change an order fulfillment service.
o Create new separate order fulfillment applications.
o Separate IT strategy from order fulfillment business strategy.
o Ensure that order fulfillment conforms to corporate standards.

34. What is a reliable measurement of Quality-of-Service (QOS)?

o Database size and growth.

o End-to-end transaction time.
o Size of HTTP cookies.
o Number of XML nodes in a message.

35. What should be considered when implementing as SOA governance practice?

o Using industry based standard business models.

o Creating a WSDL description of each service.
o Enforcing an organization-wide JNDI registry.
o Modeling the business a series of use-cases.

36. What are two unique challenges that define the need of effective SOA Governance over and above typical IT governance?

o Monitoring the performance of an SOA based solution is more complicated than typical IT projects.
o Application and Infrastructure are viewed as a portfolio of assets and services.
o SOA is based on several open, industry standards and technologies.
o SOA is implemented in a heterogeneous IT environment.
o Assets, services and business processes are reused across all the company’s organizational structures.

37. Users of a rebate payment system should not issue checks to relatives. The operation of the rebate department is split across
multiple components. Which is the most effective governance strategy for monitoring check-issuing activity?

o Configure the enterprise service bus (ESB) to maintain an audit trail of all messages.
o Require a signature to authorize a check.
o Analyze all application server request logs using a BPEL script.
o Use SOA to monitor the bank account statements.

38. A corporate SOA governance policy mandates that anonymous access to services by personnel and components is not allowed.
Where is the point to enforce authenticated access?

o In the application server

o In the messaging server
o At the enterprise service bus (ESB)
o At the corporate firewall

39. In SOA, security authorization rules enforce:

o The determination of the identity of a business service user.

o The principals allowed to use a business process.
o Compliances with governmental security regulations.
o Privacy by encrypting the incoming data within a business process.

40. What is the recommended role of the governance body in the funding of an SOA project?

o It doesn’t have a role in project funding. Every team in the SOA project decides their required funding on their own.
o It should follow a consultative role and when required offers its recommendations on project funding.
o It only sets up guiding principles to determine project funding and every team follows these principles to determine their
team’s project funding.
o It should identify the required project funding and strictly ensures it is followed by everyone.

41. A change to a single business service could affect which two areas of a served enterprise?

o Deployment guidelines.
o IT Policy.
o Personnel.
o Governance.
o Processes.

42. What are two reasons to monitor the lifecycle of a business service?

o A business service could be a part of multiple business processes.

o The business service lifecycle is a foundation of response time.
o IT should carry out maintenance of internalized discovery mechanisms.
o Many consumers could be affected by one business service.
o The corporate board needs to manage the governance upgrade lifecycle.

Section 5 - Preparing for SOA (22%)

A. Position SOA benefits with respect to business and IT strategy.

B. Capture and assess business issues and drivers.
C. Capture and assess IT issues and drivers.
D. Describe the people and technology factors that impact readiness for SOA.
E. Identify barriers to SOA adoption.
F. Describe the entry points into SOA.

Total Questions : 12

43. Which business issue most accurately describes the foundation from which all else in SOA can be built?

o An abstraction layer between business processes and the services that are provided
o An active working covenant between IT and business groups
o The changing business and IT roles when moving towards SOA
o Business management needing to know the details of how an application is built

44. Which three are barriers to the adoption of SOA?

o Business and IT are not always aligned.

o The perception that it seems too difficult to do the job properly.
o The company is focused on incremental delivery of services.
o The value proposition of SOA has been fully communicated.
o The business requirements are not fully understood.
o The Return-On-Investment (ROI) is immediate.

45. What is a valid IT challenge in adopting and managing SOA for providing enterprise wide business services?

o Choosing open standards for service transport.

o Designing appropriate granularity of service compositions.
o Minimizing impact to the customers due to platform change.
o Content-based routing of services.

46. Which two factors have a positive impact on becoming ready for SOA?

o A single platform environment.

o Limiting the amount of change in the organization.
o A clear separation of function which bounds the scope of the component service.
o Service decomposed to the right level.
o Not using the internet as a communication channel.
47. What are the three most common drivers to adapting an SOA?

o Having a shared service model.

o Having application neutral interfaces.
o Fostering a culture of reuse within ones development teams.
o Having business services re-implemented as Web Services.
o Having immediate Return-On-Investment (ROI) for almost all projects.
o Adapting the latest distributed technologies and tools.

48. What are the two benefits of aligning IT strategy with Business strategy?

o Breaking down proprietary barriers by enforcing the use of standards.

o Saving time, money and effort through reuse of components.
o Recording all software to reflect business services.
o Homogenizing the IT environment to promote faster integration.
o Clearer justification of IT investment through closer association of IT with business services.

49. An SOA compliant business needs to add new and enhanced implementation to its existing service while providing backward
compatibility. What is the most effective way to support the existing and new service consumers transparently?

o Add a new service operation to the existing service interface

o Create a new interface for the new service with the same namespace
o Create a new interface for the new service with a new namespace
o Use mediation services with necessary versioning

50. Which adoption strategy is considered to be invalid when implementing an SOA?

o Making a business case for the adoption of the architecture.

o Validating available technologies.
o Selecting a business pilot and enabling a line-of-business.
o A big-bang approach.
o A progressive adoption strategy.

51. What is considered a barrier to the adoption of SOA?

o Time spent justifying the business value of SOA.

o Leveraging an enterprise roadmap for introducing SOA into an enterprise.
o A low expectation of SOA reusability and control.
o A focus on non-functional requirements of an SOA deployment, such as security and performance

52. Which three factors affect the readiness of SOA?

o The maturity of SOA technologies.

o Business have changes at such an unprecedented rate that skills and cultural adaptability fell short.
o SOA solves all technical and business problems.
o SOA is, in part a marketing slogan, a set of slides and quick fixes that can be applied.
o SOA alleviates the need for prioritizing investment opportunities.
o There is a fundamental shift in the way businesses will be required to adopt and change.

53. How does SOA justifies investment on IT resources?

o By focusing on technical operations.

o By focusing on more complex and richly featured technologies.
o By developing a diversity of methods and approaches to solve technical issues.
o By closer alignment of IT to business services.

54. “Start building a view of key business processes by aggregating information to help people make better decisions” – which SOA
entry point most accurately matches this sentence?

o People
o Process
o Connectivity
o Information