Rebecca Wirfs-Brock is a software design pioneer who invented the set of object design practices known as Responsibility-Driven Design (RDD) and popularized the x-Driven Design meme (RDD, TDD, DDD, BDD). She is an internationally recognized leader in the development of effective software design and architecture techniques. Among her widely used innovations are use case conversations and object role stereotypes. She was the design columnist for IEEE Software and the author of two influential texts, Designing Object-Oriented Software, and Object Design: Roles, Responsibilities and Collaborations.

In her work, she helps teams hone their design and architecture skills, manage and reduce technical debt, and address architecture risks. Although best known as a software design guru, she is also known as an innovator of techniques for simply expressing complex requirements and effectively developing and communicating software architecture. Her research interests focus on the cognitive and social aspects of software development including: Naturalistic decision-making (NDM) and software architecture decisions; decision-making models for software architects; design heuristics and their relationships to software patterns, guidelines; values and practices for sustainable software architecture and its evolution; software design and development ethnography; practical software design methods; agile architecture and design practices; patterns and pattern languages; object-oriented design; software modeling; domain modeling; documenting complex software systems; and communicating design intentions.