Anita Carleton
Director, Software Solutions Division
Anita Carleton is a member of the Executive Leadership Team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and serves as Division Director of its Software Solutions Division. In that role, Carleton leads the SSD in its mission of advancing the state of the practice in software engineering through applied research, development, and the transition of innovative technologies for building and acquiring software-intensive systems, with the specific goal of making software a strategic advantage for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Carleton maintains the Software Solutions Division as a leader in software engineering by cultivating research collaborations with CMU and others in academia, directly engaging with major defense acquisition projects, partnering with industry, and informing DoD policy makers. Most recently, Carleton led a national study that engaged the software engineering community to define a national agenda for software engineering research and development for the next decade titled Architecting the Future of Software Engineering: A National Agenda for Software Engineering Research & Development.
Carleton has more than 35 years of technical and senior leadership experience in the software engineering industry. Before taking the role of Division Director for the Software Solutions Division, Carleton served as director of the SEI Software Engineering Process Management Program, where she managed the SEI's software development and measurement initiatives. This work was designed to yield high-quality software and high-performance teams, and she led initiatives to produce models and measurement practices that are now applied throughout the software industry both in the U.S and abroad. Before joining the SEI, Carleton held technical and management positions in industry. At GTE Government Systems in Massachusetts, she designed, developed, and tested software for the Minuteman and Peacekeeper missile systems. She also served as the lead systems modeling and simulation engineer at the Goodyear Tech Center in Ohio, where she was responsible for designing new passenger tires using experimental design and statistical analysis techniques.
Carleton publishes on numerous topics in software engineering and is active in several professional organizations. Her seminal research in applying statistical process control techniques to the U.S. Space Shuttle software data led to Carleton’s co-authored book, Measuring the Software Process: Statistical Process Control for Soft-ware Process Improvement. Carleton is an IEEE Fellow, chairs the IEEE Software Advisory Board, and served as the General Chair of the International Conference on Software & Systems Processes 2022. She has received numerous awards and recognitions for her technical and leadership contributions in software engineering, including from The Journal of the Quality Assurance Institute for her leadership in software measurement and from Dr. Barry Boehm—a member of the SEI’s board of visitors—for her leadership in defining the SEI Core Measures and establishing a measurement program to facilitate data-driven decision making for the DoD.
Carleton holds a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she was the recipient of the MIT Sloan Leadership Fellowship. Carleton is a graduate of the Leadership Pittsburgh Program and serves as Vice Chairman of the Board for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Western Pennsylvania.