The inaugural meeting of the Melbourne IASA (International Association of Software Architects) chapter is this Thursday.   What is the IASA, I hear you ask?  From the IASA web site:

--snip--
We started the IASA to deal with some major issues facing IT architect's today:
  1. Experience isnt portable: every employer defines and uses architecture differently, sometimes making our experience almost useless when changing companies.
  2. Resources are scarce: architects have very few resources (content and education) to work with. It is often very difficult to find the materials we need to do our jobs.
  3. Difficult to judge quality: very few people agree on the fundamental components of architecture or what it takes to become a qualified architect. Without a dependable internal forum we cannot hope to achieve quality architectures.
  4. Lack of community: there is no way to quickly find peers of our own caliber to discuss the issues which drive us.

--snip--

I'm really pleased to be helping out on the committee of the Melbourne chapter.  There is also an Adelaide chapter, and there are plans afoot to start a Sydney chapter.  Keep checking back with the IASA site for more detail on the progress with these, and for more information on IASA in Australia and New Zealand please contact IASA ANZ Region Chair Clarke Scott, or sign up for the IASA Melbourne mailing list here. 

Anyway, the session this week is presented by Martin Granell, of Readify.  Martin is test-driving his Tech.Ed 06 content at the session:

Topic: "How to get your grandmother building missile defence systems" by Martin Granell

Abstract: How do you get moderate developers building high quality software? In this session, we look at four of our projects where we attempted to build high-quality self-sufficient software factories, which were adaptive to changes in staff, requirements and budget. The four projects were in very different environments: government, industry body, private sector enterprise and independent software developer. We show how the people, process, frameworks and tools produced some effective, and some not-so-effective, development environments. We outline the lessons learned, and how we would approach those projects again, using technology such as VSTS, Team Foundation Server, and the Microsoft Software Factory initiative

Date: Thursday 1 June 2006
Time: 12:30pm
Venue: CITC, Mezzanine Level, 257 Collins St, Melbourne

See you there!