Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Podcast Series

With the increasing complexity of software systems, the use of third-party components has become a widespread practice. Cyber disruptions, such as SolarWinds and Log4j, demonstrate the harm that can occur when organizations fail to manage third-party components in their software systems. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Carol Woody, principal researcher, and Michael Bandor, a senio...

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Carol Ware, a senior cybersecurity engineer in the SEI’s CERT Division, discusses her career path, the value of mentorship, and the importance of diversity in cybersecu...

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mel...

Across the globe, women account for less than 30 percent of professionals in technical fields. That number drops to 22 percent in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Instit...

At the request of the White House, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) began exploring use cases for large language models (LLMs) within the Intelligence Community (IC). As part of thi...

Modern software engineering practices of Agile and DevSecOps have provided a foundation for producing working software products faster and more reliably than ever before. Far too often, however, these practices do not address the non-software concerns of business mission and capability delivery even though these concerns are critical to the successful delivery of a software product. Through our work with govern...

Increasingly in government acquisition of software-intensive systems, we are seeing programs using Agile development methodology and earned value management. While there are many benefits to using both Agile and EVM, there are important considerations that software program managers must first address. In this podcast, Patrick Place, a senior engineer, and Stephen Wilson, a test engineer, both with the SEI Agile...

As developers continue to build greater autonomy into cyber-physical systems (CPSs), such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and automobiles, these systems aggregate data from an increasing number of sensors. However, more sensors not only create more data and more precise data, but they require a complex architecture to correctly transfer and process multiple data streams. This increase in complexity comes wit...

To better understand the potential uses of large language models (LLMs) and their impact, a team of researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute CERT Division conducted four in-depth case studies. The case studies span multiple domains and call for vastly different capabilities. In this podcast, Matthew Walsh, a senior data scientist in CERT, and Dominic Ross, Multi-Media Design ...

Research and development of quantum computers continues to grow at a rapid pace. The U.S. government alone spent more than $800 million on quantum information science research in 2022. Thomas Scanlon, who leads the data science group in the SEI CERT Division, was recently invited to be a participant in the Workshop on Cybersecurity of Quantum Computing, co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the White House Offi...

Far too often software programs continue to collect metrics for no other reason than that is how it has always been done. This leads to situations where, for any given environment, a metrics program is defined by a list of metrics that must be collected. A top-down, deterministic specification of graphs or other depictions of data required by the metrics program can distract participants from the potentially useful information that...

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The ability of artificial intelligence (AI) to partner with the software engineer, doctor, or warfighter depends on whether these end users trust the AI system to partner effectively with them and deliver the outcome promised. To build appropriate lev...

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, Bill Nichols and Julie Cohen talk with Suzanne Miller about how automation within DevSecOps product-development pipelines provides new opportunities for program managers (PMs) to confidently make decisions with the help of readily available data.

As in commercial companies, DoD PMs are accountable for the ov...

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, the workforce decentralized and sh...

Independent verification and validation (IV&V) is a significant step in the process of deploying systems for mission-critical applications in the Department of Defense (DoD). In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Justin Smith, senior Agile transformation leader in the SEI Software Solutions Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about how to ...

Zero trust architecture has the potential to improve an enterprise’s security posture. There is still considerable uncertainty about the zero trust transformation process, however, as well as how zero trust architecture will ultimately appear in practice. Recent executive orders have accelerated the timeline for zero trust adoption in the federal sector, and many private-sector organizations are following suit. Researchers in the C...

In Ansible, roles allow system administrators to automate the loading of certain variables, tasks, files, templates, and handlers based on a known file structure. Grouping content by roles allows for easy sharing and reuse. When developing roles, users must deal with various concerns, including what operating system(s) and version(s) will be supported and whether a single node or a cluster of machines is needed...

In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Gregory J. Touhill, director of the SEI CERT Division, talks with principal researcher Suzanne Miller about the 2020 attack on Solar Winds software and how to prevent a recurrence of another major attack on key systems that are in widespread use. Solar Winds is the name of a company that provided software to the U.S. feder...