Rebecca Parsons
Contents
Books in this wiki: Building Evolutionary Architectures
Background
Dr. Rebecca Parsons is Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks. She has decades of applications development experience spanning distributed systems, compiler design, genetic algorithms, and computational biology. Before ThoughtWorks, she was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida (teaching compilers, programming languages, distributed computation, machine learning, and computational biology) and a Director's Postdoctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory researching parallel computation, genetic algorithms, and nonlinear dynamical systems. She holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.
Core Positions
- Distributed computation and systems thinking as a foundation for architectural reasoning
- Evolutionary architecture as a natural extension of agile engineering practices to the architectural level; the fitness function concept draws directly on her background in evolutionary computation and genetic algorithms
- Diversity and inclusion in the technology industry as a professional and institutional obligation
Books
Building Evolutionary Architectures — Building Evolutionary Architectures (2017, with Neal Ford and Patrick Kua)
Co-authored the originating text on fitness functions as an architectural governance mechanism. Parsons' background in evolutionary computation (from which the fitness function metaphor is drawn) and distributed systems directly shaped the conceptual framing. She is also co-author of Domain-Specific Languages and The ThoughtWorks Anthology.