Challenges and Metrics in Digital Engineering, page 1
www.sei.cmu.edu/podcasts
Challenges and Metrics in Digital Engineering
Featuring Bill Nichols as Interviewed by Suzanne Miller
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Welcome to the SEI Podcast Series, a production of the Carnegie Mellon University Software
Engineering Institute. The SEI is a federally funded research and development center sponsored
by the U.S. Department of Defense. A transcript of today’s podcast is posted on the SEI website
at sei.cmu.edu/podcasts.
Suzanne Miller: Welcome to the SEI Podcast Series. My name is Suzanne Miller, and I am a
principal researcher in the SEI Software Solutions Division. Today, I am joined by my friend and
colleague, Bill Nichols. Bill is a senior member of the technical staff in the SEI Software
Solution Division also, and he has been a frequent guest on our show to talk about many types of
cool work he did with us here at the SEI. Today, we are going to be talking about his work in
digital engineering adoption. Welcome, Bill.
Bill Nichols: Thank you.
Suzanne: For those that haven’t heard from you before, tell us a little bit about yourself, what
made you come to the SEI, and what is the work that … I would like people to understand the
scope and breadth of the work that you do here because you do a lot of different things.
Bill: My background is in physics. I did my graduate work at Fermilab some time ago. But a lot
of the work in physics today is doing things like data analysis and data collection. So that was
kind of a natural segue into the work I did industrially in nuclear engineering, where I worked on
scientific and engineering codes for use in nuclear-reactor design. Around the turn of the century,
we started a project at our lab to update a lot of the older codes, many of them dated back to the
1960s. Literally the first Fortran compiler outside of IBM was used on some of these codes. So
they were really aging, and they needed to be upgraded, a fairly large body of code needed to be
updated. It was between a couple of laboratories. I led a project that took the lead on going
through this effort. That was my first experience with software engineering at some scale with
cross-disciplinary teams. We had engineers. We had programmers. Of course, we had to do
management reports. So that really got me into the program- and project-management aspects of
software development. Now, the SEI had come over to help us with some of that. That is where I
met Watts Humphrey and some of the others.
