Rebecca Parsons

CTO, ThoughtWorks

Guest speaker

Evolutionary architecture

Is your architecture fit for purpose in a rapidly changing world? With business needs and models changing so rapidly, it’s crucial to have an architecture that is responsive to change. Historically, this responsiveness has been sought by anticipating the areas where a system must be adaptable. Recent experiences, however, have shown that current approaches need to evolve, given the pace and magnitude of changes in the technology landscape and expectations for features and performance.

In this talk, Rebecca Parsons will unpack how the traditional approaches of evolutionary architecture are evolving and show you how to:

• Use fitness functions to govern software development efforts
• Balance the needs of architects and development teams
• Implement techniques that enable evolutionary architecture
• And make the transition to an evolutionary architecture – even in the face of legacy systems!

About Rebecca Parsons

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks’ Chief Technology Officer with decades-long applications development experience across a range of industries and systems. Her technical experience includes leading the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems. Separate from her passion for deep technology, Rebecca is a strong advocate for diversity in the technology industry. Committed to increasing the number of women in coding and STEM fields, Rebecca served on the board of CodeChix and acted as an advisor to Women Who Code.

Before joining ThoughtWorks, Rebecca worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimisation, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. She also worked as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and nonlinear dynamical systems.

Rebecca has held the position of chairwoman for four years on the Agile Alliance Board of Directors and has served the organisation over a total of six years. Rebecca is also the co-author of Domain-Specific Languages, The ThoughtWorks Anthology and Building Evolutionary Architectures.