SEI Areas of Work: Acquisition

Acquiring software-intensive systems that work on their first promised date is a national imperative. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has developed the Acquisition Support Program (ASP) and worked with industry and government to develop the CMMI for Acquisition model to address the unique demands and challenges of acquisition. The SEI helps acquisition organizations to improve their processes and minimize risks. Explore the topics listed on the left for more information about each.

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Guidance for benchmarking and improving your system acquisition processes?

• CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ) is a model designed for use by acquirers who obtain needed capabilities (products and services) from suppliers. This model is a continuation of work to define best practices for organizations that acquire products and services or outsource development and support, which was work begun in a partnership between General Motors and the SEI.  This model can be used in combination with the Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement (SCAMPI) appraisal method to evaluate the acquisition capabilities of acquirers.
• The guidebook Understanding and Leveraging a Supplier’s CMMI Efforts: A Guidebook for Acquirers is a resource specifically designed to help acquisition organizations benefit from their suppliers' use of CMMI for Development and avoid problems that can result from unrealistic expectations.
• The CMMI for Acquisition, Version 1.2 Primer focuses on effective acquisition activities and practices in government and non-government organizations that are implemented by first-level acquisition projects (e.g., System Project Office/Program Manager) and helps organizations begin to understand key CMMI concepts and prepare for use of the CMMI for Acquisition model.
• The SEI IDEAL model is an organizational improvement model for initiating, planning, and implementing improvement actions.

A model for benchmarking and improving your contractor's product development processes?

• CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV) is a model designed for use by suppliers who develop products and services. This model can be used in combination with the Standard CMMI Appraisal Method for Process Improvement to evaluate the development capabilities of suppliers.
• The SEI Team Software Process (TSP) methodology was developed to help integrated engineering teams more effectively develop software-intensive products.

Techniques to effectively identify and manage risk?

• The Risk Management Overview helps organizations prevent problems, while identifying the functions of risk management, as well as risk versus opportunity.
• The Principles of Risk Management explains seven principles of effective risk management.

Tools to increase the dependability and security  of the products you acquire or develop?

• The SEI Product Line Practice (PLP) provides organizations with techniques for finding and exploiting commonalities across software systems to reduce costs and increase quality in software product lines.
• The SEI Integration of Software-Intensive Systems Initiative identifies and matures methods and techniques for broad-based and sustained integration and interoperability across components, systems, and systems-of-systems.
• An Open Systems approach can help you efficiently acquire and maintain high-quality systems that are technically up to date.
• The SEI Software Architecture Technology (SAT) helps software acquirers and developers use effective architecture-centric practices and better predict the impact of software architectural decisions on quality attributes such as survivability, security, performance, dependability, and maintainability.
• The SEI Performance-Critical Systems (PCS) Initiative helps software acquirers and engineers increase their ability to predict, evaluate, and manage critical performance attributes of software-intensive systems.
• The SEI Predictable Assembly from Certifiable Components (PACC) explores how component technology can be extended to achieve predictable assembly, enabling runtime behavior to be predicted from the properties of components and their patterns of interactions.
• The SEI Survivable Systems Initiative and the CERT Coordination Center ensure that appropriate technology and systems management practices are used to recognize, resist, and recover from attacks on networked systems.

Reliable information about software engineering and software technologies?

• The Software Engineering Information Repository (SEIR) offers data and customized analyses of the software engineering practices that lead to improvement.