IASA

FOr more details on the recent AGM meeting please go to the following location:

IASA AGM

The UK IASA leadership are pleased to announce that we will be community sponsors for the upcoming Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit on 26-27 September.

The latest UK IASA meeting went ahead last night which focused on 2 topic areas:

1. The role of the architect

2. IASA Certification plans

I have posted the slide decks here for your information.

The next UK IASA AGM will be held as part of the next IASA meeting on the 12th March from 6pm at 10 Great Pulteney St, London, W1F 9NB.

More details to be provided shortly.

The IASA are proud to be community sponsors of QCon, a new enterprise software development conference is starting in London,  March 12-16th, 2007 with 2 tracks dedicated to architecture.

IASA members will be entitled to a £50 discount on registering by using the keyword IASA.

The conference will feature 2 days of tutorials and three full conferences days with over 70 sessions presented by over 40 speakers including Martin Fowler, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Dave Thomas (Pragmatic Programmers), Spring creator Rod Johnson, LINQ creator Erik Meijer, and more. QCon aims to become a major annual event providing a venue for learning, networking, and tracking innovation in the Java, .NET, Ruby, SOA, and Agile communities, with tracks on architecture & design, Ajax, Investment Bank architectures, and Usability.

Additional discounts are available to people who register by Jan 15th and Feb 15th.  Visit qcon at: http://qcon.infoq.com
 
A conference brochure is also available (PDF)

The tracks and topics have also been 90% defined, and are as follows:
 
Agile Foundations
Team building, Scrum@Google, User Stories & Release plans, Retrospectives
 
Agile Journey to Mastery Open Space
Open Space + sessions: Org. challenges, Quality management, Mock roles, Expertise
 
Ajax & Browser-Based Applications
Dojo, Prototype, Ajax Patterns, Google GWT, Flex
 
Architecture in context of quality attributes
Performance & Scalability, Modfiability, Availability, Security
 
Investment Banking Architectures
Real time, STP, Messaging, AMQP, SEPA, MiFID, Front office
 
Java in Action
Spring, TestNG, EJB 3, AOP, Eclipse/Swing RCP
 
Java Emerging Technologies
Seam, OSGi, JRuby, Grails, JVM Clustering

.Net Enterprise Development
WPF, ASP.NET, LINQ, WCF, Interop
 
SOA: Bridging business and technology
Adoption, Governance, Rest vs. SOAP, Service Composition, Case studies
 
Software Usability for software developers
Analysis, Architecture, Patterns, Best practices
 
What makes Ruby Roll?
Metaprogramming, DSLs, Rails plugins, Mongrel, Rails deployment

Conference Tutorials
Tutorials are still being organized, and currently include:
 - Certified Scrum Master Class, with Jeff Sutherland
 - Domain Specific Languages in Groovy, with Guilluame Laforge and John Wilson
 - Hands-on Agile Development Workshop, with Kevlin Henney
 - Introduction to the EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API, EJB co-spec lead Mike Keith
 - Agile Leadership: Moving from Management that Controls to Management that Facilitates, Diana Larsen
 - Ajax-enable your Java application with DWR, Joe Walker
 - Usage-Centered Software Design: An Activity-Based Approach, Larry Constantine
 - What can JMX do for you? Simon Brown

Keynotes
Keynotes currently include Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels,  Microsoft's Eric Meijer, and ThoughtWork's Martin Fowler and Dan North

QCon is being organized jointly by InfoQ.com and JAOO, a prestigous 10 year-running enterprise software conference from Denmark. In the tradition of InfoQ.com and JAOO conferences, QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers and will be similar to JAOO in it's commitment to quality content and a high quality attendee experience.  If you're excited about the UK finally having a world-class conference like this, please support the conference by letting others know about it!

Visit qcon at: http://qcon.infoq.com

The Software Practice Advancement conference is on 25-29th March. This conference is run by the SPA Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. Formerly, the OOPS group (Object-Oriented Programming and Systems). The conference is now in it's 15th year and over time the interests of our members evolved until eventually the mission of the group had little or nothing to do with object-oriented technology and so we renamed both the group and the conference, to Software Practice Advancement or SPA for short.

SPA2007 will explore a broad range of subjects from leading-edge technology, through pioneering software development practices, to innovative techniques for managing projects and the people that make up the project team. There are several sessions relevant to architects and IASA are media sponsors.

We're delighted to have Brian Marick, Dave Thomas and Tony Hoare as Keynote
speakers, along with a fantastic programme of over 4 days.

Other sessions include:
. Concurrency in Java 5 - Wolf Schlegel
. Architecture Modelling on Agile Projects - Roman Pichler & Jim Siddle
. Creativity in practice - Marina Haase
. API Design as if Unit Testing Mattered - Michael Feathers
. Lessons Learned from Scaling XP - David Talby
. Effective Distributed Workforces - Laura Hill & Bernard Horan
. XML Databases - Chris Wallace
. Scrapheap Challenge: Use and Usability - Nat Pryce & Ivan Moore

For full details of the programme see http://www.spaconference.org/

SPA is the only conference of its kind, with its unique combination of interactive learning, leading-edge topics and open and frank discussions
with Europe's leading software practitioners. The conference venue, Homerton College in Cambridge, provides an excellent mix of modern and traditional architecture set in beautiful grounds for this residential conference.

To secure your place today and for more information, visit www.spaconference.org or call 0870 760 6863. We are offering early-bird discounts until 31st January with discounts to IASA and BCS members.

Code Generation 2007 is a new event for software practitioners. The event focuses on Model-Driven Architecture, Model-Driven Development, Domain-Specific Languages, Software Factories and other generative approaches.

The event will bring together the leading practitioners in this area to offer the benefit of their experience. The major tool vendors will also be present to discuss how to adopt their latest products.

With its emphasis on practical advice the event is the ideal opportunity for architects, developers and others to understand how to benefit from these emerging tools and technologies.

Code Generation 2007 takes place from May 18th – May 20th 2007 in Cambridge, UK. Visit http://www.codegeneration.net/cg2007/ for more information. IASA members receive a 10% discount on conference fees.

The organisers are currently seeking session proposals. The deadline for session proposals is Friday 12^th January. Accepted session leaders will have their conference fees waived.

The UK leadership team is starting to take place with the addition of two new officers; Paul Homan for Events and Chris Cooper-Bland for Education. So please join me in welcoming them to the team. In doing this I thought it worth reminding you all of the leadership team as a whole:

• Matt Deacon, Chair and President
• Blair Mcglashan, Treasurer
• Richard Allen, Secretary
• Paul Homan, Events Officer
• Christine Cooper-Bland, Education Officer

We're actively looking for a Content Officer to help manage the new community portal.

Is this You?

The IASA are currently putting together an author list. Each author may have 1 or more articles and will receive a packet containing:

• an example article
• a profile of the intended audience (Sr Developer/IT person)
• a detailed template and FAQ for writing the article (format, voice, diagrams etc)
• a schedule for delivery
• a fictional company and series of projects to use for examples

Articles should be 3-5 pages in length targeted at a Sr Developer. Authors will be given a detailed schedule for delivery of each article they are assigned. We are trying to get two names per topic in case one author has issues. An author will receive $500 per article but must sign over the copyright to the IASA (your name can still be listed on the final work). Authors for this project will be shortlisted for the next project which is to develop full course work on each of the topics (which will also be well paid).

If you are interested then please let us know.

Microsoft will once again be running the Architect Insight conference for senior IT Architect professionals and IASA will be community sponsors. If you are looking to drive the debate around architecture then this should be of interest.

Maintaining our ongoing close relationship with the BCS SPA Specialist Group the IASA will once again be media sponsors of SPA 2007. The SPA Conference brings together software development practitioners from around the world to exchange and develop the latest ideas and skills in software architecture, design and development. SPA provides a unique high-energy learning experience that explores a broad range of subjects from leading-edge technology, through pioneering software development and deployment practices, to innovative techniques for managing software projects and the people that make up the project team.

Bearpark publishing responsible for VSJ,  IT Architect and delivering the DevWeek are launching a brand new event Software Architect 2007 and IASA will once again appear as community sponsors. The event is taking shape and more details will follow in the mean time they would like to extend the call for content to the IASA with a deadline of 9^th December. If you are interested then please send an email to

Upcoming Microsoft Architect Forum events:

Virtual Server - The Tip of the Iceberg

Reading, 28 November

Managing the Application Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2005

Reading, 13 December