Linda Northrop

Director of the Research, Technology, and System Solutions Program, SEI Fellow

Key Responsibilities

Linda Northrop has more than 35 years of experience in the software development field as a practitioner, researcher, manager, consultant, and educator. She is currently director of the Research, Technology and System Solutions Program at the SEI where she leads the work in architecture-centric engineering, software product lines, system-of-systems practice , and ultra-large-scale systems research. Under her leadership, the SEI has developed software architecture and product line methods that are used worldwide, a series of five highly acclaimed books, and software architecture and software product line curricula that include 11 courses and 6 certificate programs.

Professional Background

Before joining the SEI, she was associated with both the United States Air Force Academy and the State University of New York as professor of computer science, and with both Eastman Kodak and IBM as a software engineer. She is a recipient of the Carnegie Science Award of Excellence for Information Technology and the New York State Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is a frequently invited speaker and has given keynotes at such conferences as the European Software Engineering Process Group (ESEPG) Conference, the Aspect-Oriented System Development (AOSD) Conference, and the International Conference on Software Engineering (ISCE).

She is coauthor of Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns and chaired both the first and second international Software Product Line Conferences (SPLC1 and SPLC2). In addition, she is a member of the OOPSLA Steering and the AOSD Steering Committees, the Editorial Board of Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development, the Clemson University Computer Science Industrial Advisory Board, The GSAW Organizing Committee, the ACM, and the IEEE Computer Society, and from 1993-2000 was a computer science accreditation commissioner.

She completed her undergraduate education at LeMoyne College and her graduate education at the State University College of New York at Brockport, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the University of Rochester.

Publications (recent or significant)

L. Northrop, P. Feiler, R. P. Gabriel, J. Goodenough, R. Linger, T. Longstaff, R. Kazman, M. Klein, D. Schmidt, K. Sullivan, and K. Wallnau, Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future. Pittsburgh, PA: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2006.
Paul Clements, Larry Jones, John McGregor and Linda Northrop paper, "Getting From There to Here: a Product Line Adoption Roadmap," appeared in the December 2006 issue of the Communications of the ACM.
Paul Clements and Linda Northrop, "Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns," Published by Addison-Wesley in the SEI Series.
A Framework for Software Product Line Practice
Bühne, Stan; Chastek, Gary; Käkölä, Timo; Knauber, Peter; Northrop, Linda; & Thiel, Steffen. "Exploring the Context of Product Line Adoption." Published in the Product Family Engineering Workshop 5 (PFE5) Proceedings, November 2004.
McGregor, John D.; Northrop, Linda M.; Jarrad, Salah; & Pohl, Klaus. "Initiating Software Product Lines." IEEE Software 19, 4 (July/August 2002): 24-27.
Northrop, Linda M. "SEI's Software Product Line Tenets." IEEE Software 19, 4 (July/August 2002): 32-40.
Northrop, Linda M. Ch. 6, "Object-Oriented Development," 148-159. Software Engineering, Volume 1: The Development Process, Second Edition. Dorfman, M. & Thayer, R. H., eds. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, 1997.