Tricia Oberndorf

Senior Member of Technical Staff

Key Responsibilities

Acquisition improvement across the DoD and civil agencies, with particular emphasis on software engineering and systems of systems

Professional Background

Tricia Oberndorf has over 35 years of experience in the field of software engineering. She is currently a member of the Acqusition Support Program. In this position, she leads teams in studies and customer support projects.

Previously Tricia was director of the Dynamic Systems Program at the SEI, which has become part of the Research, Technology, and System Solutions program. The Dynamic Systems Program worked in the areas of system integration, systems-of-systems interoperability, COTS-based systems, and performance critical system aspects such as reliability, dependability, and real-time behavior. She is co-author of the book, Managing Software Acquisition: Open Systems and COTS Products.

Most of Oberndorf's career has focused on issues of integration and interoperability in various contexts. Since coming to the SEI she has been a principal in work on open systems, the construction of systems from COTS products, and development of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) environments. She has worked as a principal investigator, consultant, and instructor. She has led and participated in the development of several courses and tutorials on these subjects, targeted to both managers and practitioners. She has published a wide range of technical reports. Her work has involved her in many different project circumstances, both national and international.

Prior to working at the SEI, Tricia spent almost 20 years with the United States Navy, where she worked with software engineering environments and interfaces and served as co-chair of two working groups of the Navy's Next Gneration Computer Resources (NGCR) Program: the Operating Systems Standards Working Group (OSSWG) and the Project Support Enviornment Standards Working Group (PSESWG).

Prior to the NGCR work, she co-chaired a working group that developed a standard interface for Ada Programming Support Environments (APSEs), called the Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS) and the application of various methodologies and tools to the design of software. This led to her original involvement in research on software engineering environments (SEEs) in 1976, participating in the production of several analyses, designs, and demonstrations and in the development of generic SEE requirements.

Publications (recent or significant)

Brownsword, Lisa; Carney, David; Oberndorf, Patricia,"The Opportunities and Complexities of Applying Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Components," CrossTalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, Volume 11, Number 4, April 1998.
Oberndorf, Patricia, "COTS and Open Systems", CBS monograph series. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, February 1998. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cbs/monographs.html
Carney, Davic and Oberndorf, Patricia, "The Commandments of COTS: Still in Search of the Promised Land," CrossTalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, May 1997.
Meyers, B. Craig and Oberndorf, Patricia, Managing Software Acquisition: Open Systems and COTS Products, ISBN 0-201-70454-4, 2001, Addison-Wesley.
Co-guest editor, with Anatol Kark and Cornelius Ncube, of the IEEE Software Special Issue on Opportunistic Software Systems Development, November/December 2008.