Software Engineering Institute

Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is a federally funded research and development center headquartered on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. SEI also has offices in Arlington, Virginia, and Frankfurt, Germany. The SEI operates with major funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. The SEI also works closely with industry and academia through research collaborations.
The SEI program of work is conducted in several principal areas: acquisition, process management, risk, security, software development, and system design.


Engineering practices
SEI work in engineering practices increases the ability of software engineers to analyze, predict, and control selected functional and non-functional properties of software systems. Key SEI tools and methods include the SEI Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) method, the SEI Framework for Software Product Line Practice, and the SEI Service Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART).

Acquisition practices
The goal of SEI work is to improve organizations acquisition processes.


Security
The SEI is also the home of the CERT/CC (CERT Coordination Center), the federally funded computer security organization. The SEI CERT Program's primary goals are to ensure that appropriate technology and systems-management practices are used to resist attacks on networked systems and to limit damage and ensure continuity of critical services in spite of successful attacks, accidents, or failures. The SEI CERT program is working with US-CERT to produce the Build Security In (BSI) website, which provides guidelines for building security into every phase of the software development lifecycle. The SEI has also conducted research on insider threats and computer forensics. Results of this research and other information now populate the CERT Virtual Training Environment.
Carnegie Mellon, Capability Maturity Model, CMM, CMMI, Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method, ATAM, and CERT are registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.