Jan 7
2013
2013
Looking Ahead: The SEI Technical Strategic Plan
Acquisition , Agile , Cyber-physical Systems , SEI Research , Ultra Large Scale Systems No Comments »
First in a Series
By Bill Scherlis
Chief Technology Officer, Acting
The Department of Defense (DoD) has become deeply and fundamentally reliant on software. As a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC),
the SEI is chartered to work with the DoD to meet the challenges of
designing, producing, assuring, and evolving software-reliant systems in
an affordable and dependable manner. This blog post—the first in a
multi-part series—outlines key elements of the forthcoming SEI Strategic
Research Plan that addresses these challenges through research and
acquisition support and collaboration with DoD, other federal agencies,
industry, and academia.
The
majority of research in cyber security focuses on incident response or
network defense, either trying to keep the bad guys out or facilitating
the isolation and clean-up when a computer is compromised. It’s hard to
find a technology website that’s not touting articles on fielding better
firewalls, patching operating systems, updating anti-virus signatures,
and a slew of other technologies to help detect or block malicious
actors from getting on your network. What’s missing from this picture is
a proactive understanding of who the threats are and how they intend to
use the cyber domain to get what they want. Our team of
researchers—which included 
Organizational
improvement efforts should be driven by business needs, not by the
content of improvement models. While improvement models, such as the 
All
software engineering and management practices are based on cultural and
social assumptions. When adopting new practices, leaders often find
mismatches between those assumptions and the realities within their
organizations. The SEI has an analysis method called Readiness and Fit
Analysis (RFA) that allows the profiling of a set of practices to
understand their cultural assumptions and then to use the profile to
support an organization in understanding its fit with the practices’
cultural assumptions. RFA has been used for multiple technologies and
sets of practices, most notably for adoption of 
Engineering
the architecture for a large and complex system is a hard, lengthy, and
complex undertaking. System architects must perform many tasks and use
many techniques if they are to create a sufficient set of architectural
models and related documents that are complete, consistent, correct,
unambiguous, verifiable, usable, and useful to the architecture’s many
stakeholders. This blog posting, the second in a two-part series, takes
a deeper dive into the 
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