Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. She has written and contributed to many books and numerous articles, with her latest book published last year – More Fearless Change co-authored with Mary Lynn Manns.

Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, agile development, and the change process.

With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics, Linda’s background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains.

More about Linda..

Dr Linda Rising is an independent consultant, author and international speaker. She is credited as having played a major role in having moved the pattern approach from design into corporate change. She also contributed to the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, edited by Kevlin Henney and published by O´Reilly in 2009.

She has a Master of Science degree in computer science at Southern Illinois University and a PhD degree in computer science from the Arizona State University, with her thesis entitled Information hiding metrics for modular programming languages relating to object-based design metrics. In industry, she worked in the areas of telecommunications, avionics, and tactical weapons systems.
Linda has extended the use of patterns, building upon the work of Christopher Alexander on a pattern language for architecture and the work of the Gang of Four on patterns for software development. She extended the use of patterns to the support of organisational change. Her work and lectures cover patterns, retrospectives, agile development approaches and the change process, topics on which she is an internationally known lecturer.

Linda is co-author of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, and editor of the book Design Patterns in Communication Software, a compendium of patterns. Her book The Pattern Almanac 2000 provides a comprehensive inventory of patterns compiled from publications in patterns conferences and books prior to the year 2000. Rising’s indexing of existing patterns is seen as “a significant start toward achieving the ultimate goal of a pattern database.”

The study The scrum software development process for small teams by Rising and Norman S. Janoff is cited as the first published study in which the scrum, a development process for small teams which includes a series of “sprints” which each last typically between one to four weeks, was tested in real-life projects. The study has been cited for showing “that non-hierarchical teams work more effectively through the complex iterations and time-consuming gestation of a software program” and that “they gain strength through shared successes and failures.”

Rising has been keynote speaker at the agile 2007 conference (topic: “Are agilists the bonobos of software development?”), the OOP 2009 conference (topic: “Who Do You Trust?”), the Agile testing days Berlin 2010 (topic: “Deception and Estimation: How we fool ourselves”),at the GOTO Amsterdam 2014 conference (topic: “Science or Stories?”), and at the European Testing Conference 2016 in Bukarest (topic: “The Agile Mindset”).

Her work has inspired many in the agile community, for instance Steve Adolph and Paul Bramble, who, together with Alistair Cockburn and Andy Pols, expanded further on Rising’s use of patterns.

Latest Book : More Fearless Change (2015)