Code Freeze 2025 Keynote Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Parsons

How Will Evolutionary Architecture Evolve?

Abstract

A basic premise of evolutionary architecture is that we can’t predict what changes will occur. However, we can make some reasoned guesses on how things might change over the short to medium term. In this talk, I will introduce the concepts, principles and practices of evolutionary architecture. I will then speculate on how things might change over the next few years with these principles and practices.

Biography

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is currently independent, having been Thoughtworks CTO and CTO Emerita for over 15 years. She has more years of experience than she’d like to admit in technology and large-scale software development. She recently co-authored the book “Building Evolutionary Architectures” with Neal Ford and Pat Kua.

Before ThoughtWorks, she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida, after completing a Director’s Post Doctoral Fellowship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her interests include parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, domain specific languages, evolutionary architecture, genetic algorithms, and computational science.

Rebecca received a BS in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, and both a MS and PhD in Computer Science from Rice University.