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A significant factor in successfully dealing with the flood of data unleashed by the IT industry is ensuring its quality. This is a complex problem touching on all aspects of the life-cycle of the data through all aspects of the organisation. We are delighted to welcome Andreas Bartsch to SPIN to share his in-depth knowledge and experience.

We then close the SPIN's activities for the year of 2008 with a more technical topic, one that many people may have heard of, but Aspects has much untapped potential to simplify software and improve quality and maintainability. Aslam will tell us more about how the patterns and thinking behind aspects can also help to solve higher level architectural and design problems.

Please note that our meeting next week will be on Tuesday to accommodate our speakers.

• Data Quality - Andreas Bartsch, PBT Group
  presentation slides
• Solving Domain Problems with Aspects - Aslam Khan, Factor10

Tuesday, 11 November, 18h15
Bandwidth Barn
Cape Town

Anyone is free to attend. Please RSVP by emailing YES or MAYBE via our contact form.

Venue

Bandwidth Barn
125 Buitengracht Street
Cape Town
Click here for a map

Agenda

18:15 Welcoming and Introduction
   Albert Visagie
18:20 Understanding Data Quality
   Andreas Bartsch
19:00 Solving Domain Problems with Aspects
   Aslam Khan
19:40 Closing and Thanks
   Albert Visagie
19:45 Networking & Discussion

Abstracts

Understanding Data Quality

Implementing data quality management and its associated controls in an organisation is a very complex task. This is due to the fact that data span organisational boundaries, often in uncontrolled ways. In most organisations there are also no clear distinctions of ownership and custodianship of data, which in turn blurs the responsibilities related to data quality. In this presentation we discuss why data quality is important, how it can be measured and how a data quality strategy can be embarked upon.

Solving Domain Problems with Aspects

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a notoriously difficult topic which many do not grasp at the first attempt, or even after several attempts. Although AOP has its roots in fundamental object oriented patterns, part of the problem with the complexity in AOP is the terminology and language used. Another contributor is the examples of problems that are typically solved using Aspects. Commonly, aspects are used to solve difficult infrastructure problems within applications, such as caching, transaction management, authentication and authorization of objects, lazy loading, amongst others.

Comparatively, the use of aspects to solve domain specific problems is less frequent. It is certainly not a first choice technique because it is poorly understood and carries the perception of introducing complexity. However, by focusing on the simplicity of the patterns upon which AOP is founded, many domain specific problems can be solved elegantly and simply.

In this seminar, we will cover the following:

• The basic set of object oriented patterns upon which AOP is founded
• Thinking about aspects without being tied up with AOP terminology as a transitioning technique to moving to AOP
• Examples of real world domain problems where aspects were used to solve the problems
• From these examples, patterns are extracted which can be used as targets for AOP solutions

Speaker Profiles

Andreas Bartsch

Andreas Bartsch, Services Manager at PBT Group, has more than 20 years experience in the IT industry. Although having specialized in Project - and Programme Management, he has fulfilled various IT management roles in South Africa and the UK. During his career he has had extensive exposure to BI, and has been actively involved with the implementation of large BI initiatives.

Aslam Khan

Aslam Khan has eighteen years of professional experience covering software architecture and development using design patterns, agile methodologies and various static and dynamic programming languages. He works intimately by coaching software development teams to design and build sustainable, low maintenance enterprise applications by focusing on team agility, simplicity over complexity and by taking the fundamental position that design is more valuable than a technology.

He holds the philosophy that successful architectures and enterprise applications can be achieved if one immerses themselves completely in the business domain of the enterprise. With a degree in Electronic Engineering, Aslam believes that software architects must be able to build what they draw and still finds room in every engagement to practice his craft of software development.

Aslam is regular writer in various technical forums and speaker at local and international events and is a DZone editor for the Architecture zone (http://architects.dzone.com/). He is part of the factor10 team (www.factor10.com) and you can read his blog at http://aslamkhan.net/.