Working with clients who are consuming your services? Here is a mini-checklist of questions to ask:

1. While executing request/reply on the service interface is there a timeout value set on the call?
2. Is there code/logic to handle SOAP Faults /system exceptions when invoking the service?
3. Is building service header separated from the payload? This will facilitate reuse across services that share common header parameters
4. If there are certain error codes that the calling code can handle, is there logic for each of them?
5. Is the physical end point information (URL string for HTTP, Queue connection and name for MQ/EMS) stored in an external configuration file?
6. Is UTF-8 encoding used while sending XML requests to the service i.e. by making use of platform-specific UTF encoding objects?
7. If using form-encoding are unsafe characters such as ‘&’, ‘+’, ‘@’ escaped using appropriate %xx (hexadecimal) values?
8. While processing the service response is the logic for parsing/processing SOAP and service-specific headers decoupled from processing the business data elements?
9. Is the entire request/reply operation – invocation and response handling logic – encapsulated into its own class or method call?
10. While performing testing, is the appropriate testing environment URL/queue manager being used?
11. Is a valid correlation id being used in the service request? This is very essential for aynchronous request/reply over JMS (JMS Header) or HTTP (callback handler)