A Technical History of the SEI

Leading the Community
Charged with a challenging mission, the SEI has responded by building a mature organization that
has not only kept abreast of evolving technology, but also has consistently anticipated DoD needs
and prepared technology solutions to meet those needs. At the same time, the SEI has provided
leadership to the broader software engineering community.
A major contributing factor in the SEI’s leadership position has been the early strategic decision
to engage the community in its efforts to achieve the greatest impact. In essence, the SEI identifies
a problem area important to the DoD and the broader software engineering community, recruits
a recognized leader in that area, and then engages the community in a consensus-building
effort to produce a solution. The community responds because it respects the SEI’s independent
position, free of commercial or government bias. As the SEI’s reputation has grown, leaders in the
community have become willing to cooperate because they want to influence the direction and
they respect the SEI’s proven ability to lead them to a consensus. It is not uncommon for senior
corporate officers at the level of director of engineering or even vice president, senior research fellows,
senior government officials, and leading academics to participate in SEI-led efforts. International
participation is also the norm. These external contributions are often significant, involving
many hours of collaboration; and the results are beyond what any organization could produce on
its own. More importantly, the results are accepted by the community.
Much of the work described in this volume is a result of such a process, refined over time. The
following are a few notable examples:
the master of software engineering curriculum and the undergraduate curriculum in software
engineering
the Ada Adoption Handbook, which provided guidance to DoD program managers in the
adoption of Ada
the Capability Maturity Model for Software and its derivatives
the CERT Coordination Center (originally the Computer Emergency Response Team/Coordination
Center) processes
the International Process Research Consortium’s outline of process research
the ultra large scale systems definition of software engineering research directions
the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL), which has been adopted as an international
standard for avionics systems
the OCTAVE method’s use for compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act (HIPAA)
CMU/SEI-2016-SR-027 | SOFTWARE ENGINEERING INSTITUTE | CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY 294
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