The Future of Software Engineering and Acquisition with Generative AI

Anita Carleton is an Executive Leadership Team Member and Division Director of the Software Solutions Division at Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU’s) SEI, with more than 35 years of technical and senior leadership experience in the software engineering industry. Carleton has most recently led a national study engaging the global software engineering community to define a vision, strategy/national priorities, and roadmap for software engineering research and development titled, Architecting the Future of Software Engineering: A National Agenda for Software Engineering Research & Development. Her seminal research in applying statistical process control techniques to the U.S. Space Shuttle software data led to Carleton co-authoring the book, Measuring the Software Process: Statistical Process Control for Software Process Improvement. Her bachelor’s degree is in applied mathematics from CMU and her MBA is from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Carleton serves on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Software Advisory Board and is an IEEE Fellow.

Dr. Doug Schmidt is a Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering, the Associate Provost of Research Development and Technologies, the Co-Director of the Data Science Institute, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems, all at Vanderbilt University. He is also a visiting scientist at the SEI at CMU. Dr. Schmidt is an internationally renowned and widely cited researcher whose work focuses on pattern-oriented middleware, Java concurrency and parallelism, and generative AI.

John Robert is a Principal Engineer at the SEI and the Deputy Director for the SEI’s Software Solutions Division. Robert provides leadership for software engineering research and the development of technologies in partnership with Department of Defense (DoD) programs and industry to enable the broad transition of new software engineering approaches. Robert has led multiple SEI technical partnerships with high-priority DoD programs, resulting in high customer value and beneficial connections to SEI research.

Dr. Ipek Ozkaya is a principal researcher and the technical director of the Engineering Intelligent Software Systems group at the SEI. Her areas work include software architecture, software design automation, and managing technical debt in software-reliant and AI-enabled systems. At the SEI, she has worked with several government and industry organizations in domains including avionics, power and automation, Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, and information technology (IT). Ozkaya is the co-author of a practitioner book titled, Managing Technical Debt Reducing Friction in Software.

James Ivers is a Principal Engineer and lead of the Architecture Design, Analysis, and Automation group at the SEI. His experience spans research and application of work in software architecture, code analysis, formal methods, and scaling our ability to evolve software. His most recent work focuses on using artificial intelligence (AI) for software engineering to support large-scale refactoring.

Shen Zhang is a Senior Software Engineer within the Enabling Mission Capability at Scale directorate at the SEI. He provides expertise in software development processes and static code analysis for real-time mission critical software-intensive systems in the Air Force and Navy. More recently, he has been involved with using large language models to accelerate software engineering use cases. Prior to working at the SEI, he developed simulation products for industrial control systems in the commercial power industry.