William Novak

Senior Member of Technical Staff

Key Responsibilities

Support and improve the acquisition, engineering, and sustainment of software-reliant systems by working with acquisition Program Offices to assist and advise on software acquisition issues. Conduct research into current software acquisition issues, with a focus on the governance, incentives, and dynamic organizational behaviors of software-reliant acquisition programs. Provide education to the broader software acquisition community on both the technical and organizational aspects of conducting software-reliant acquisition programs.

Professional Background

Mr. Novak has over 25 years of experience with real-time embedded software product development, government software acquisition, and business management in defense contracting, commercial, and small company environments. Mr. Novak has held positions with GE Aerospace including Chief Engineer for GE Military and Data Systems Operation and Senior Software Engineer at GE Strategic Systems Division. He has also served as Development Tools Product Manager for Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processing Division, and held the position of Director of C/C++ Products for C and C++ language cross-development systems, and product manager for embedded Ada cross-development systems at Tartan, Inc. Mr. Novak has previously served as an Industry Resident Affiliate to the SEI, participating in the Domain Analysis for Software Reuse project.

Publications (recent or significant)

"Success in Acquisition: Using Archetypes to Beat the Odds", William E. Novak and Linda Levine, Software Engineering Institute Technical Report CMU/SEI-2010-TR-016, September 2010
"Software Acquisition Planning Guidelines", Software Engineering Institute Handbook CMU/SEI-2005-HB-006, December 2005. Edited by William E. Novak, Contributors: Julie B. Cohen, Anthony J. Lattanze, Linda Levine, PhD, William E. Novak, Patrick R. H. Place, Ray C. Williams, and Carol Woody, PhD
"Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) Feasibility Study" Software Engineering Institute Technical Report CMU/SEI-90-TR-021 K. Kyang, S. Cohen, J. Hess, W. Novak, A.S. Peterson
"Domain Analysis Bibliography, A", Software Engineering Institute Special Report CMU/SEI-90-SR-003 J. Hess, S. Cohen, B. Holibaugh, K. Kyang, A.S. Peterson, W. Novak, P. Carroll