Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon

Staff Page for Linda M. Northrop

Contents: Contact Background Publications Memberships
Job title

Director, Product Line Systems Program

Administrative home

Product Line Systems Program

Key responsibilities

Manage the Product Line Systems Program and provide technical direction to the Product Line Practice, Software Architecture Technology, Predictable Assembly From Certifiable Code Initiatives, and the Ultra-Large-Scale Systems Study.

Professional Background

Linda Northrop has more than 35 years of experience in software development as a practitioner, researcher, manager, consultant, and educator. She currently is director of the Product Line Systems Program at the SEI where she leads the work in software architecture, software product lines, predictable construction, and ultra-large-scale (ULS) systems. 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. She is coauthor of the book Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns and led the research group on ULS systems that resulted in the book, Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future (ISBN 0-9786956-0-7).

She is a frequently invited speaker and has given keynotes most recently at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), the Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems, and Applications Conference (OOPSLA), the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), the Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEET), the Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWC), the Aspect-Oriented System Development Conference (AOSD), the Siemens Software Conference, the Boeing Software Conference, and the Siemens Software Conference. She is a recipient of the Carnegie Science Award of Excellence for Information Technology, the New York State Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award.

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. As a private consultant, Linda also worked for an assortment of companies covering a wide range of software systems. She chaired both the first and second international Software Product Line Conferences (SPLC1 and SPLC2). She is a past chair of the OOPSLA Steering Committee, was OOPSLA 2001 Conference Chair, and from 1993-2000 was a Computer Science Accreditation Board (CSAB) commissioner.

Publications (recent or significant)

Professional Memberships and Activities

Contact Information

Electronic mail address: lmn@sei.cmu.edu

Phone: 412-268-7638

Fax: 412-268-5758

Room: 5200