The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) works closely with defense and government organizations, industry, and academia to continually improve software-intensive systems. Our core purpose is to help organizations such as yours to improve their software engineering capabilities and to develop or acquire the right software, defect free, within budget and on time, every time. To accomplish this, the SEI

• performs research to explore promising solutions to software engineering problems
  
• identifies and codifies technological and methodological solutions
• tests and refines the solutions through pilot programs that help industry and government solve their problems
• widely disseminates proven solutions through training, licensing, and publication of best practices

Our Vision

Leading and advancing software and cybersecurity to solve the nation's toughest problems

Our Mission

To advance the technologies and practices needed to acquire, develop, operate, and sustain software systems that are innovative, affordable, trustworthy, and enduring. We achieve our mission through:

• Research – advancing the science and practice
• Collaboration – bringing together and building on work found in industry, academia, and government
• Development and Demonstration – maturing promising technologies and practices and demonstrating their utility through trial application and prototypes
• Transition – propagating proven technologies and practices through publication, standards and other venues

Our Strategic Goals

• Technical Goal - Develop, execute, and evolve a technical agenda that brings effective and scalable solutions to our stakeholders' current and future software and cybersecurity challenges.
  
• Research Goal - Be a respected thought leader in the software and cybersecurity research community.
•  Workforce Goal - Attract, develop, recognize, reward, and retain a highly capable and multi-disciplined workforce.
  
• Customer Goal - Develop a strategic customer portfolio to maximize impact on projects critical to the nation.
  
• Revenue Goal - Maintain a revenue stream that sustains the critical mass needed to achieve our mission.
  
• Operations Goal - Create an efficient organizational infrastructure that supports our strategic direction and dynamic customer needs.
  

Our Distinctive Competencies

The SEI's distinctive competencies include:

• Software Engineering and Research
• Cybersecurity
• Emerging Software Technologies
• Acquisition Solutions
  

Our Values

The SEI's values are excellence, integrity, impact, teamwork, and urgency. These values are the foundation of everything we do at the SEI. They hold us together when the forces of change push and pull us this way and that.

Excellence

• We expect excellence from ourselves in all that we do, every day
• We hire and develop superb talent
• We continually grow in knowledge, experience, and service
• We're leaders in our industry and professional communities

Integrity

• We work together to merit the trust of our customers and colleagues
• We are who we say we are – we are driven by our mission, do what we say and say what we do
• We treat our customers and each other with respect, fairness, honesty and dignity
• We hold ourselves accountable for practicing our values

Impact

• We take informed risks, attacking hard problems and helping solve customer challenges
• We build external capability and capacity, establish and lead communities of interest and transition knowledge through publications, standards, courses, and other avenues

Teamwork

• We integrate across our disciplines to bring our customers high impact solutions
• We are collaborative and respect the contributions of each person to the team's success
• We communicate frequently, honestly, openly

Urgency

• We are passionate about our work and operate at the speed of advancing technology
• We recognize our customers' challenges and operate at their tempo

Our History 

Since 1984, the SEI has served the nation as a federally funded research and development center based at Carnegie Mellon University, an organization that is well known for its highly rated programs in computer science and engineering. As part of Carnegie Mellon, the SEI operates at the leading edge of technical innovation. The SEI staff has advanced software engineering principles and practices and has served as a national resource in software engineering, computer security, and process improvement. See SEI Statistics and History for an overview of our accomplishments.