Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Podcast Series

In aviation, waypoints guide pilots through complex flight plans, providing some structure but maintaining flexibility. Kevin Dooley, a senior Agile transformation leader at the SEI, adopted this concept to solve one of defense acquisition's most persistent challenges: synchronizing dozens of interdependent teams without drowning in administrative noise and overhead. In the latest podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Dooley, who co-developed the Waypoints Framework with Air Force Major Adam Satterfield, sits down with Eileen Wrubel, SEI technical director for Smart Software Acquisition to discuss Waypoints and how it can help teams visualize their work and own processes so they can start collaborating.

Application programing interfaces, more commonly known as APIs, are the engines behind the majority of internet traffic. The pervasive and public nature of APIs have increased the attack surface of the systems and applications they are used in. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), McKinley Sconiers-Hasan, a solutions engineer in the SEI's CERT Division, sits down with Tim Morrow, Situational Awareness Technical Manager, also with the CERT Division, to discuss emerging API security issues and the application of zero-trust architecture in securing those systems and applications.

A recent Google survey found that many developers felt comfortable using the Rust programming language in two months or less. Yet barriers to Rust adoption remain, particularly in safety-critical systems, where features such as memory and processing power are in short supply and compliance with regulations is mandatory. In our latest podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Vaughn Coates, an engineer in the SEI's Software Solutions Division, sits down with Joe Yankel, initiative Lead of the DevSecOps Innovations team at the SEI, to discuss the barriers and benefits of Rust adoption.

Container images are increasingly being used as the main method for software deployment, so ensuring the reproducibility of container images is becoming a critical step in protecting the software supply chain. In practice, however, builds are often not reproducible due to elements of the build environment that rely on nondeterministic factors such as timestamps and external dependencies. Lack of reproducibility can lead to lack of trust, broken builds, and possibly mask hidden malware insertion. Vessel, a recent tool from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Institute (SEI), helps developers identify the difference between two container images to help sort benign from problematic issues. In this SEI Podcast, Kevin Pitstick, a senior software engineer at the SEI and Vessel's lead developer, and Lihan Zhan, a software engineer at the SEI working on tactical and AI-enabled systems, sit down with Grace Lewis, lead of the Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems (TAS) applied research and development team at the SEI, to discuss the Vessel tool, its development, and application in mission-critical settings.

A January 2025 Defense Innovation Board study on scaling nontraditional defense innovation stated, "We must act swiftly to ensure the DoD leads in global innovation and competition over AI and autonomous systems – and is a trendsetter for their responsible use in modern warfare." In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), chief technical officer Tom Longstaff discusses the SEI's long-standing work to help the DoD rapidly scale technology including artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems.

Deploying cloud-centric technologies such as Kubernetes in edge environments poses challenges, especially for mission-critical defense systems. In this podcast from the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), Patrick Earl, Doug Reynolds, and Jeffrey Hamed, all DevOps engineers in the SEI's Software Solutions Division, sit down with senior reesearcher Jose Morales to discuss a recent case study involving the deployment of a hypervisor onto edge devices in a resource-constrained environment.

Evaluating source code to ensure secure coding qualities costs time and effort and often involves static analysis. But those who are familiar with static analysis tools know that the alerts are not always reliable and produce false positives that must be detected and disregarded. This year, we plan on making some exciting updates to the SEI CERT C Coding Standard to better harmonize with the current state of the art for static analysis tools as well as simplify the process of source code security auditing. In this SEI podcast, David Svobodaand Joseph Sible, both engineers in CERT's Applied Systems Group and primary developers and maintainers of the standard, sit down with Robert Schiela, deputy technical director of the Cybersecurity Foundations Directorate in CERT, to discuss the proposed changes, specifically in the area of risk assessment.