IT organizations view the adoption of agile development methods as a way of bringing an "integrated team" approach to the product development lifecycle where everyone is focused on early, frequent demonstrated results. The second shared goal is service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is an approach to deliver integrated component-based ecosystems that are assembled to efficiently execute critical business processes. The goal of SOA is to be flexible and adaptive to the constantly changing business climate. These two productive approaches, when applied concurrently, are setting the stage for the next evolution in the deployment of technology to enhance business performance and results.

Because one of the core stated objectives of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is to increase business and IT alignment and IT's flexibility in meeting changing business needs, on the surface it would seem that SOA and agile methods are a natural fit.  And within the SOA model of service production, distribution and consumption, use of agile development methods clearly has great opportunity for effectiveness on the consumption side of the equation. However, the approach by which a suite of generally reusable services within an SOA are defined and produced requires a cross-project perspective that could be viewed as running counter to a typical agile development approach. Some amount of up-front architectural thought must go into initial service definition to prevent those services being developed from becoming solely project-centric.  

In this article, the authors the use of basic patterns that can help build a software configuration management process that works well with your agile development environment. They discuss how codeline policy, private work spaces, smoke tests, private system builds, integration building, unit testing, and regression testing all work together to enable you to maintain an active development line.

Ramnivas Laddad talks about Aspect Oriented Programming, which isn't just for security and logging anymore.