Rebecca Parsons, ThoughtWorks

Rebecca Parsons

Biography: Rebecca Parsons

Dr. Parsons has more than 20 years of application development experience in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has been published in language and artificial intelligence media, served on numerous program committees, and currently reviews academic articles for several journals.

Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. She also worked as director's post doctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems.

Dr. Parsons holds a [Ph.D] in Computer Science from Rice University.

Presentation: "Opportunities and Challenges for Technology in the Developing World"

Track: IT in the World / Time: Wednesday 12:05 - 13:05 / Location: Room 202/203

Developing and deploying systems in the developing world share many characteristics with more traditional software development. However, there are obstacles that, while not unique to the developing world, are not common in traditional software settings. In addition, though, there are significant opportunities in the developing world as well.

This talk will describe both the opportunities and the challenges, as well as techniques for coping with them.

Presentation: "Agile and Enterprise Architecture are Not Mutually Exclusive"

Track: Keynote / Time: Thursday 09:20 - 10:20 / Location: Falconer Salen

There is widespread acceptance that software development using Agile methods works well. However, there are still areas of software development organizations that view their roles or mandates as incompatible with Agile methods.

This talk addresses the legitimate role of an Enterprise Architect and provides concrete recommendations on how Architects can work with Agile development teams to accomplish their objectives.

Topics will include concerns about data architecture, addressing the "ilities", and why evolutionary architecture works.