GOVERNMENT

Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has received a five-year contract renewal, funded at $411 million, from the U.S. government through June 2010. The SEI's new contract ensures that the institute will continue to pursue its mission of advancing the practice of software engineering and improving the quality of systems that depend on software. It is the fourth time that the government has endorsed the SEI mission by renewing the SEI contract; previous contract renewals were in 1990, 1995 and 2000. Beginning in the summer of 2004, the U.S. government conducted an extensive review of the SEI, culminating in the recommendation by government reviewers to renew the SEI contract. The SEI contract states that "the SEI shall provide services needed to accomplish R&D work in support of high-payoff software engineering areas that best address DoD (Department of Defense) mission needs and contribute most to supporting the acquisition and sustainment of DoD systems. These areas include technology transition, software engineering support, and research and education." The SEI was established in 1984 at Carnegie Mellon as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) dedicated to advancing the practice of software engineering and improving the quality of systems that depend on software. Through its sponsor, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, the SEI carries out its mission by focusing on software engineering management and technical practices. For the past 20 years, the SEI has defined specific initiatives that address pervasive and significant problems that impede the ability of organizations to acquire, build and evolve software-intensive systems predictably on time, within expected cost and with expected functionality.