1)  Simulating the production environment in development,

2)  Articulating policies for consumers and providers and make trade-offs regarding compatibility, security and throughput,

3)  Creating a suite of test messages for both the service customer and the service provider,

4)  Exercising each consumer and provider separately to evaluate every policy and potential exception that may be encountered in production, and

5)  Virtualization and configuration must be verified as cost-effective and scalable