Laurie Williams is an American software engineer known for her writings on pair programming and agile software development. She is a distinguished professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, and interim head of the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University.[1]
Williams graduated from Lehigh University in 1984, with a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering. After earning an M.B.A. from Duke University in 1990, she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Utah in 2000. Her dissertation, The Collaborative Software Process, was supervised by Robert R. Kessler.[2]
She joined the North Carolina State University in 2000, and was named a distinguished professor in 2018.[1]
With Robert R. Kessler, Williams is the author of the book Pair Programming Illuminated (Addison-Wesley, 2002).[3] With Michele Marchesi, Giancarlo Succi, and James Donovan Wells, she is an author of Extreme Programming Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2003).[4]
In 2009, Williams became one of the two inaugural winners of the ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award, for her work on pair programming in computer science education.[5] In 2018, Williams was elected as a Fellow of the IEEE "for contributions to reliable and secure software engineering".[6]