Comment by Chris_Newton

this is why Software Engineering as a regulated profession is going to be a necessity as much as civil engineering or electrical engineering has been

Unfortunately the challenge with this is still the same as always: do we even know how to engineer software, in the sense that established engineering disciplines use the term, yet?

If we started permitting only “qualified” software engineers to make the big technical decisions, who would decide on the required qualifications? Would it be the few experts who really have spent whole careers successfully developing genuinely high-reliability software in industry or researching innovative techniques for improving quality in academia? Or would it be people like career consultants who write popular books on “best practices” and give keynote speeches at conferences with big name sponsors?

The dominant trend in the software industry for years has been towards short-termism and ad-hoc everything. That often makes sense as a business strategy, at least given the current financial incentives, but it’s not necessarily the best way to promote robustness, predictability and longevity. Prematurely trying to codify accepted practices for engineering software might end up entrenching the status quo, when what is really needed as software eats the world is disruption by people who have demonstrably figured out better ways to do it.

So while I strongly agree that we need to raise standards in parts of the industry where Very Bad Things can happen when software fails, I don’t think regulating software engineering in the same way as more established engineering disciplines is a viable way to do that. Not yet, at least.