A Technical History of the SEI

Foreword
Angel Jordan
University Professor Emeritus, Provost Emeritus
Carnegie Mellon University
This report chronicles the technical contributions of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI)
since its inception in 1984. It is published at an opportune time, the 30th anniversary of the SEI’s
formation.
I am writing this foreword as a close observer of the institute from the beginning. Over the years,
I have had the opportunity to observe the institute as provost of Carnegie Mellon University
(CMU), twice as acting director of the SEI, as University Professor Emeritus, and now, regularly,
as just a helper providing advice as needed to division directors and members of the technical
staff in their interactions with faculty members on the campus of CMU. The report provides a
comprehensive account of the SEI’s programs, activities, and initiatives during its existence. It is
comprehensive, but not exhaustive. To enumerate and describe in more detail the numerous programs,
projects, activities, publications, etc., of an institution that has a relatively long, rich history
and a great deal of accomplishments would be a daunting task and beyond the scope of the
report.
The introduction gives a crisp description of the SEI, enumerating its key sponsor, its parent institution,
and key members of its staff at its inception. It continues with a section describing briefly
its formation, its early history, and its evolution over the years as an organization. In this part of
the report, the reader will find that changes in the leadership took place several times, with attendant
changes in strategies.
In seven chapters, the report chronicles key contributions to software engineering in architecture,
education and training, real-time embedded systems, software engineering methods, forensics,
management, and security. In the section titled “The Future of Software Engineering,” the past
three chief technical officers, Bill Scherlis, Doug Schmidt, and Kevin Fall, venture to give their
own account of the field in the future. The report is not the end of the story. It is just the first installment.
It captures the SEI strategy and also discusses developments outside the SEI.
As described in the introduction, the Software Engineering Institute is a federally funded research
and development center (FFRDC) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), through
the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology at the time, 1984.
The SEI contract was competitively awarded to Carnegie Mellon University in December 1984.
The DoD established the SEI to advance the practice of software engineering because quality software
that is produced on schedule and within budget was deemed to be a critical component of
U.S. defense systems. In fact, it was widely believed at the time that there was a crisis in software
production and the SEI was to be created as a national resource in software engineering and technology
to mitigate that crisis.
As eloquently described, prior to 1984 there were a number of commissions calling for the creation
of a Software Engineering Institute funded by the DoD. Members of these commissions came
CMU/SEI-2016-SR-027 | SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE | CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY
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