IASA

August 23, 2007 at 7pm in Tysons Corner, VA
Michael Cohen, Cigital
Pragmatic Secure Architecture  slides

Often when developers are building an application with tight deadlines and lack of resources, there is limited time to think about all the ways an application could become vulnerable. Even trying to understand an application’s security posture through an architecture can be complex, especially when one realizes that security is an emerging property. This talk aims to present some techniques that can be applied to high-level and medium-level architecture to help identify and prevent security vulnerabilities within an agile process.

Stephen Cohen is an Architect for Microsoft Enterprise Services. He has spent the majority of his career supporting the US Government in its efforts to develop software.  Having worked with more than 25 federal and numerous state and local agencies he has had the opportunity to develop low level tools, real-time, high data rate, large storage, mission, and simulation systems.

He has taught Enterprise Architecture for internal Microsoft Consultants as well as presented for Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence Group and Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Conference.  His web presentation on Project Recovery is available to Project Management Institute members and he blogs from time to time on Enterprise architecture and agile project recovery at Blogs.MSDN.com

Now that Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) has become mainstream and large volumes of content are being stored in a variety of enterprise content repositories, many corporations are looking into sharing their content with other enterprise-wide repositories and applications. Both EAI and Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) solutions allow applications to communicate with each other. However, ECI provides more options, patterns, and architectures to consider when specifically addressing content concerns.  During this presentation, Travis will illustrate the benefits of ECI, a variety of ECI properties, and explain a case study all of which corporate IT managers can leverage in their content integration strategies.

Our Thought Leadership Roundtable:

• Is comprised of members who get together bi-monthly for brainstorming about architecture and how the chapter can help local architects.
• Is designed to get smart people together with other smart people to foster the exchange ideas.
• Meets in both office-like settings and social settings depending on the time of year and topics we're discussing.

Most well designed Software Architectures are intended to support extensibility, maintainability, and reliability; however, the design’s upfront effort can fall by the way side once the rubber meets the road. A series of unconsidered imports can create a tight coupling resulting in architectural brittleness; moreover, code entropy can create an unintended level of complexity thereby reducing the ability to effectively test architectural components. By continuously monitoring brittleness and complexity metrics, Architects can address quality issues early that may affect the long term viability of architectures.

Andrew Glover is the President of Stelligent Incorporated. Stelligent helps companies address software quality with effective developer testing strategies and continuous integration techniques that enable teams to monitor code quality early and often. Andrew was the founder of Vanward Technologies, which was acquired by JNetDirect in 2005. He is the co-author of “Java Testing Patterns” and an author for multiple online publications including IBM’s DeveloperWorks and Oreilly’s ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software quality at www.thediscoblog.com.

Based on years of experience leading development in a prominent all-agile company, Jeff describes "the ideal architect on an agile software development team". According to Jeff, "in my work leading and coaching agile teams, I have observed that having an effective architect on the project is essential to the overall success of the project and of the system being built."

Jeff Nielsen is Chief Scientist at Digital Focus, where he trains and mentors teams and individuals in the use of agile methodologies.  Jeff has over 19 years of commercial software development experience, and has architected a number of mission-critical and enterprise-level systems.  Since spearheading the first large-scale XP project at Digital Focus, he has spent much of the past six years coaching agile teams for clients including America Online, Fannie Mae, Sallie Mae, and FHLB.

Enterprise Integration with SOA and ESBs Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is gaining steam due to a number of business drivers  including mergers and acquisitions, re-organizations and cost-cutting. At the same time that the demand for EAI is increasing, the expectations from an EAI solution are higher and conditions such as lower costs, reduced invasiveness on existing applications, higher scalability and enhanced manageability are casually placed in the requirements documents. The buzz from the industry as to the preferred approach to EAI for satisfying these expectations is the use of a Service Oriented Architecture-based solution.

In this talk, we will look into how SOA can be utilized to achieve integration of enterprise applications. In this process of understanding how SOA can help with EAI, we will look at some related concepts and technologies, such as the concept of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and the Java Business Integration (JBI) standard, and bring everything together into a solution through the use of Enterprise Integration Patterns. Before closing the session we will take a look at the Mule open source project, which provides an excellent low-cost framework for enterprise application integration.

Odysseas Pentakalos is the Chief Technology Officer of SYSNET International, Inc., where he focuses on providing its customers, which include Northrop Grumman, EDS, Freddie Mac, Bearing Point and IONA, consulting services in the architecture, design development and integration of large enterprise systems that utilize Java, XML, J2EE and .NET technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. He has published dozens of papers in conference proceedings and journals and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He is the co-author of the book "Windows 2000 Performance Guide" that was published by O'Reilly and contributed to the book XML Data Management.

May 18, 2006 at 6pm in Reston, VA

Ed Seidewitz

Making Today's Architecture Model-Driven, Service-Oriented, Enterprise Architecture Buzzwords Work  slides

"Architecture" has become the kind of buzzword additive that "engineering" used to be in software (and business process) circles. Among many others, there are such popular phrases as Model-Driven Architecture, Service-Oriented Architecture and Enterprise Architecture. Unfortunately, it is not at all clear that the same thing is really meant by "architecture" across these (and other) cases. Nevertheless, as usual, within the hype generated by each of these buzzwords there is a nugget of real worth. Indeed, when you put them all together you get something which sounds unweildy, but, perhaps, may truly aspire to a defensible use of the term "architecture".

It is "Model Driven", because models are used as primary artifacts to persist common understanding and drive any new development. It is "Service Oriented" because it is focused on the creation of solutions that identifiably deliver valuable services to end users. It is "Enterprise" because it takes into consideration the entire organization delivering those services, not just information systems or applications. And it is "Architecture" because it straddles the business and the technical, looking for creative solutions that are effective for the business client and achievable for the technical developers.

This talk will provide examples of how this approach is coming together and really being used today.

Mr. Seidewitz is Vice President, Model Driven Architecture Services with Data Access Technologies, Inc. (DAT). In this position he leads all customer focused professional services business efforts. He and his team focus on the creation and execution of Enterprise Architecture strategies for DAT clients. He was formerly Chief Architect for InteliData, a developer of Electronic Bill Payment and Presentment (EBPP) solutions where he oversaw the strategic InteliWorks product-line architecture and had the lead role in applying best-practice modeling, architecture and development process methods. Prior to that, he held a number of positions leading professional services efforts in modeling, architecture and development as well as 12 years as a software and aerospace engineer with NASA. He has 20 years of professional experience with object-oriented software development and software systems architecture. He has also been active for almost 10 years in the Object Management Group, involved in the standardization process for a number of versions of the Unified Modeling Language and related specifications.

The 90-minute session will discussed software reliability in the context of today's predominant software development methodologies, including agile development and RUP. Topics addressed included design-level reliability, recovery, the viability of "quick fixes", and the relationships between reliability, security, and maintainability. 

Cliff Berg has been a pioneer in the use of Internet technologies to build scalable and reliable enterprise systems. Cliff has worked to develop approaches that meld reliable software design practices with a variety of methodologies, from agile to RUP to waterfall, in a cost-effective manner. Cliff was a member of the team that developed the feature-driven design approach, including Peter Coad, Jeff DeLuca, and David Anderson in Singapore during the 1997-1999 period, and was co-founder of Digital Focus, a company that specializes in the use of Agile methods for developing enterprise-class systems. Cliff is an expert in architectural quality audits and assessments in the areas of design integrity and assurance, and is the author of High-Assurance Design, published by Addison Wesley. Cliff was the author of Advanced Java Development For Enterprise Applications, published by Prentice Hall.

Enterprise applications continue to become more complex and mission critical. These applications need to be engineered quickly and within budget upon the right architectural foundation. While there are established tools and standards for design and code, there is little agreement in the software industry on how to define and document architecture. In this fast-paced and highly interactive session, Suvajit presented the practice of architecting software as a software pattern. He did:

• Motivate the need for architecting software

• Provide practical techniques you can apply

• Show you real-world, illustrative, samples

• Highlight emerging trends and Web resources

Participants brought ideas and opinions to this engaging session and learn how to effectively architect your systems. This was also the kickoff of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the IASA (International Association of Software Architects) .

Suvajit is the VP of Engineering at Entrieva and is responsible for managing their Engineering team and software products/tools.  Entrieva’s flagship product, ClickSense, delivers rapid and scalable contextual analysis of Web pages, search queries, and RSS feeds for accurate targeting of online ads and sponsored content.

Prior to joining Entrieva, Suvajit was the Product Development Director at TEOCO's Telecom line of business (LOB). As part of the Telecom LOB leadership team, Suvajit helped manage a profitable, rapidly growing, $20M/year line-of-business of over 100 people, driving the definition and execution of annual business strategy, financial plan, and organizational design. At TEOCO, Suvajit managed a development team of 18 people to extend, maintain, and customize BTP (BillTrak Pro), a market-leading telecom cost and revenue management product. Before TEOCO, Suvajit has managed the development of and architected complex enterprise applications for healthcare, EAI, publishing, and wireless markets in companies such as Focus Technologies, SAGA Software, Thomson Technology Services Group, and LCC.

Suvajit has a Master of Science in Computer and Systems Engineering from Rensselaer and an undergraduate in engineering from IIT Kharagpur in India.   Suvajit has previously presented at IEEE on software development methodologies.