Slashdot Mirror
Software Engineering Body of Knowledge
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The IEEE has a project going to establish a Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. I'd recommend that all Slashdotters read this and send comments to this since this project could lead to the officially designating Software Engineers as a real Engineering discipline. That could then mean that licenses could be required to practice software development and that this could to regulation and other legal ramifications." On the surface this looks like a fairly boring document/process, but this is a major step forward - turning software engineering from an art into a science.
I've found thousands of really detailed, useful pages about software engineering, design and manufacture at the Portland Pattern Repository. Why are they trying to make yet another big repository with a structure that doesn't neccesarily scale as well as a wiki?
To see the PPR, surf to http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
sweet, let's wake up Marx and get him to use GNU/Linux.
turkey day
Microsoft says I'm a systems engineer. I studied long and hard for the exams. And then had to relearn almost everything for the real world. You wouldn't believe my surprise when I found out that in the enterprise people don't use NT boxes as routers and use third party software instead of NT backup and a tape drive on each server. But getting back to the point. How come I'm not considered a "real" engineer? I got my license from Microsoft. Like developers are real engineers anyway. All they do is click, drag and drop code in until they say it's ready. Then the patches come out.
Hey, I'm all for recognising the science of software engineering. But don't let the pendulum swing too far the other way such that we end up forgetting the art of software engineering.
I still beleive that Software engineering is as much art as science. It's just less free-form. The biggest thing that most people miss is method and Structure (can you say SSADM? Aarrgh!). This is what leads to the failure of most software projects - the winning bidders (the lowest bidders) are often just a bunch of untrained amatures (Mostly "Microsoft Certified Professionals") who, while they can talk a good project don't know how to successfully complete a large task (only 20% coding time and all that) as they're only used to banging together a quick web-site/access back end. The art comes into making it efficient (Elegant code, a lost art to most MS programmers), The Science goes into realising that art in a functioning form.
Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but Electrical Engineering is designated a "real Engineering discipline", right? Well I've never taken a course on EE, nor do I have any kind of license or certification, but I'm still allowed to take my radios apart and fix them when they break, right? Why would this official designation of software engineering affect anything? Am I the only one who doesn't get this?
grep -ri 'should work'
It is very important that all slashdotters contribute to make sure that Software Engineering includes a great knowledge of free software and free operating systems.
Of course software engineers make new systems but they can't make good new one if they don't know the good old one, really.
To set a good example I will provide them my great expriences with linux installation and writing very good programs in assembler.
I URGE YOU ALL TO DO THE VERY SAME !!!
If we don't free software will be unknown to software engineers in some years because Microsoft had set up all standards for software engineering which all included Microsoft Windows.
There will be noone to contribute to the linux kernel and other projects anymore, because all older free software developers are very rich on Hawaii from money made by consulting. And all younger developers will be software engineers and won't know the vast qualities and possibilities of free software !!!
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Someone please define the differences between, say... software developer, software engineer, and ummm... code monkey...
Now who has to get certified, and is legally responsible? Being a code monkey, I already have too much responsibility... don't want more... where do I protest?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The article is slashdotted, so this is based on the writeup.
Requiring a license to be a programmer is a bad thing. If you think it will improve software quality, you're mistaken. Think I'm crazy? How many software contributers have an engineering certification? Sorry, no cert, no programming. No open-source software.
OK, so let's change the rules a bit. "You must be certified in order to write commercial software". You think that will help anything? Who determines what classifies as commercial software? Is my Mandrake CD commercial software? If so, does that mean all the software on it, including the free software, is now commercial? Not good.
However, what if there's a non-commercial certification process. Run, not by RedHat or Microsoft, but by a vendor-independent group of engineers. You prove to them that you are a capable engineer/programmer/whatever. They give you a certificate that actually means something. Perhaps require the certification to be re-written every N years.
Now, companies can have a certification that says this person is a software engineer. Not a Microsoft-certified software engineer. Not a RedHat-certified software engineer. An engineer-certified software engineer. No commercial influence, transferrable skills, and a large skill set.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
So because I have no university degree I'm suddenly considered useless? I studyed long and hard to change careers from banking. I took a 9-month intensive IT course which was at times very hectic. The J2CP exam was no joke, neither was the 60% of my knowledge that I learned without formal training on the job in my first 2 months, or the first month of my new job, in which I had to learn yet ANOTHER new set of skills and development tools with almost no training whatsoever.
Are we suddenly going to stop rewarding initiative, independent learning, flexibility and gumption, and only give credit to people who were lucky enough to figure out their career paths in their late teens, unlike me? Proposterous!
This space left intentionally blank.
At the university I attend there is already a Software Engineering curriculum, and if you take a look at places like the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, you'll see that this concept has been around for a little while now.
The site is 100% slashdotted, but this sounds ivory-towerish. I say learn science, create software. But I could be taught otherwise. :)
However, this dosn't stop everybody and their dog from calling themselves engineers! Not that I really care, I just find it one of the most abused words out there. How many people out there call themselves doctors who don't have a medical degree.
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
This topic will have huge ramifications. Too many people call themselves engineers these days. It wasn't a problem in the past because the general public could differentiate between a "custodial engineer" and a professional engineer. Now, professional engineering is becoming blurred by more and more technical types calling themselves engineers, without even close to the training and standards a professional engineer is held to. I'm not familiar with American laws, but in Canada, you are not allowed to call yourself an engineer without a professional license. The Canadian professional engineering bodies have successfully stopped Microsoft, Cisco and others from calling their technicians "engineers". "Software engineering" is the most dangerouse of all, and in my opinion, the most needing of the professional designation, if only to apply appropriate training standards, ethics and liability. Think about it: don't you want to know that the guy who designed the fly-by-wire software for your 767 or A300 knew what he was doing?
Some Universities have a degree in Software Engineering. I think that's a lot better than a license system. Engineering isn't just about writing code, it's about studying for four years and learning the breadth of your vocation before diving into its depths.
(Emphasis added)
Yes, you can fix your own radios. You'd be allowed to write your own software. But would you be allowed to write it commercially?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
If software engineers become a trade, they'll eventually get their own union. This union would control the engineers' work by setting standards for education, and defining how certain jobs will be done.
I'll give a cookie to the first person who names a company that would be quite happy to control the board overseeing this as-yet imaginary union.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Here in Ontario, there is a Software Engineering degree that is acredited as an official Engineering degree. After graduating from that, if you're going to be building large scale public software you'd have to get a P.Eng. That's basically a license to practise your engineering discpline when it affects large number of Doe's.
Perhaps the IEEE legislation will open that up to a large number of the practising software engineers in the world. But in the end, most engineers won't need it. Only the manager who'll be putting his neck on the line will need to have the designation just like it's with P.Eng.
I think "Art" is way more interesting than Science. Please..! Programming IS a ART!
My title cannot legally be "engineer".
I'm a developer.
I don't have the ring. (-:
I took the EIT exam which this first step tword becomming an "engineer". It was 4 hours and covered all of the engineering fields (electrical, mechanical, civil, chemisty).. It wasn't too bad, but tested my entire undergraduate schooling.
After going through graduate computer science/software engineering, I can't see how a CS ciriculum is going to prepare students for this "engineering" test.
The states make you an engineer, and unless they are all going to impliment a standard and separate cs engineering test, I don't see it flying.
Computer science pay is much much higher than
civil engeering..
Needing a license to practice only applys to CERTAIN types of engineers doing CERTAIN projects. I can tell you right now that if you go to work for Intel, but don't have an EE, you're not going to be arrested or anything. Sure, Intel may be taking a chance, but that's their problem. Now, Civil Engineers designing bridges is a different issue.
I expect it would be the same for software engineering. Good (and neerly necessary) to have the certification, but it won't impede Free Software in any way.
I see a *HUGE* problem with requiring licensure to practice software development, aside from the legal ramifications on open source work.
I do mostly low level coding, firmware, device drivers, things of that nature. I can interface with anything I can get a spec for.
I do not, however, know much at all about application development. I do not know much about writing an OS. I do not know much about game development. Yes, I can understand the concepts involved, but that differs from having the familiarity required to do those things with confidence in my abilities.
I agree that making software less of an "art" would help large corporations take fewer risks in hiring coders. While not a big fan of "That which benefits M$ benefits America", I can also see the side benefit of helping to separate the real developers from the web weenies.
Until we have only one platform, however, with only one API, only one programming language, and only one conceptual model (ie, OO, which I personally dislike), software development *MUST* remain an art.
Let's not go -too- far with turning it into a science. Because you see, in the U.S. your code can put you in jail now even if it -is- art; making it into a science will only cause it to become available to further restriction and censorship.
Background: I am a chemical engineer, and I currently work in water treatment. /.ed, so I'm not sure entirely what the IEEE is up to. However I would think that there is a definite need for accredited software engineers for software systems that would pose a hazard to life or limb by their failure. A control system for an oil refinery, or medical equipment, for example are no place for feature rich bloatware that needs to be re-booted once a day.
To me an essential part of engineering has always been a sense of responsibility to society as a whole. Technology is harnessing natural forces in a way that provides benefit to someone or some group. Engineers try to ensure that this technology is used is as safe a fashion as possible. Minimization of risk. Planes stay in the air, bridges don't fall down, the water is safe to drink.
The article is hopelessly
The other side of the responsibility coin is liability. Engineers must show due diligence and carry liability insurance. It would likely be easier to insure an accredited software engineer working on a mission critical system.
I'm anxious to see what might come out as accreditation criteria for software engineers. I hope it would require some knowledge of the larger technological context and social responsibility.
Laugh while you can, monkey boy!
I got a joint electronics & software eng degree some years ago (in UK). I remember being told that the BCS was the professional body for CS. In America would the ACM not be more apt to play this role?
It's already a science. It's called "computer science". Engineering is something else.
Another term for engineering is "applied science". (My brother-in-law has a B.ASc. and a M.ASc. He's an electrical engineer.) Since mathematics is a form of philosophy, which is an art more than anything else, and is a foundation for science, I'd say science is applied art.
So where does "computer science" and "software engineering" fit in? Well, as computer scientists, we don't really follow the scientific method, so we're not really scientists. We're more like engineers, but we don't have to follow the same rigid course layout (at my alma mater, anyway) and we don't get to be P.Eng's.
Whatever. I don't think it will seriously affect my career path--I work with a lot of engineers who took programming jobs. We make the same money and do the same work. The difference? Sometimes they don't know how to write efficient code, because that's not what they studied. Oh, and sometimes they were those little iron rings.
And one last thing on Michael's statement--it's already a science. And like any science, it will always intrinsically be art.
-dlek
Up here in the northern part of North America, Engineering is a protected word (legally protected), and that is fine. However, under no circumstances should the same Engineers think they have enough of a clue to check and verify my work (I base this on experience where those words are used at software folks by Engineers). Sounds like a freaking power trip, but someone forgot to pay the power bill....
Software should be written by software professionals, but trying to define a software professional is pretty hard (try impossible). I would heartily suggest the good folks keep on designing stuff they know (Second Narrows Bridge anyone) and leave software alone.
-- The Hollow Man
Non illegitimati carborundum
(semi serious)
There's the Neophyte
the Newbie,
the Script Kiddie
the Coder
the Developer
the Hacker
and finally the Guru.
What do we need with an engineer? Where whould he fit in? I would guess somewhere between Developer and Hacker, (because I know some engineers and they aren't Gurus in their respective fields, but are competent.)
I guess I'm spoiled, being able to look at Internet RFC's online anytime I want. Doesn't the IEEE charge serious $$ for access to the documents they put forward as standards? That is so, well, 20th century... No thanks. Some things just shouldn't be part of a business model.
Disclaimer: I haven't been able to read the article yet; it's taking a while to load up. (Plus, I bet only half of the people that post don't even bother reading it before posting anyways) Computer Science and computers have always been well ahead of the people that create and develop laws. IF this ever became a law, very few people would actually follow it. I mean, how many top-notched computer programmers actually have official title education? I mean, probably a quarter of the very best programmers out there started doing it BEFORE computer science even existed. Secondly, the only possible use that this would be would be if the government or a top-tier company needed a developer to develop a fail-safe application. Let's say NASA needed an application, this might be a benchmark for them to identify talent. Lastly, to some extent, I agree that software engineering should be come a little more structured. There is a major difference in the code style and programming style of programmers that have proper education and those that are self learned. With education, coding becomes a more structured practice. This is a valuable asset in a corporate or group environment. If a certain person write code that only he or she understands, it costs the company even more because of the greater amount of time that it takes for other people to learn his code and style. However, on the other hand, some self-learned individuals, not learning structured development styles, are able to take shortcuts or find optimizations to produce better codes. (As always, this is a generalization. There are obviously exceptions to these two rules.) So to sum it up, this IEEE proposal would benefit schools and corporations because it creates structure in programming style. However, something like this could never become law in the same way that you need a medical license to practice law.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
We have had some discussion on the C++ newsgroups recently, regarding the possibility of getting a decent C++ certification scheme started in the industry. Bear in mind that we're talking about a major language here, and one that has an incredibly high number of "users" who don't really know the first thing about it -- or worse, get that first thing wrong -- but think they're experts. There is no single commercial body that "owns" C++, so no political spin needs to be put on things. Basically, this is a prime candidate for certification.
Except that we concluded viable certification was not going to happen. Without a major industrial sponsor, and without a large body of experts who are actually qualified to administer the necessary tests, you'd never get it off the floor.
And what would "certified in the use of C++" mean, anyway? There are many different areas of C++ programming, and while some projects use most/all of them, other projects would never use, for example, much of the STL. To have any practical use, any certification would have to be more precise than just "good at C++".
Remember, this is just one language, and still the expert population felt it would be impossible to provide an effective recognition in today's environment. What hope can anyone have of effectively regulating software engineering as a whole in this today's development world, then? There are more contradictions in this industry than anywhere else I've ever seen, with some companies successfully using development methods for years where other companies have failed completely using the same methods. Who's to say, with any justification or authority, which methods a "chartered software engineer" should use?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Computer science is not unlike math: for most practical applications you need to know something else, be it physics, chemistry, economics, etc.
Why put this barrier in front of people? If you think that a four letter acronym after your name speaks louder than your experience, you must be a consultant for the Big 5...
I'm encouraged to see this happening, although it's also a rather scary thing for me since I'm one of those self-taught folks. Nearly every large project I've worked on would have benefited if the people working on it were formally trained as software engineers; the way things are now, most projects lack important things like unit tests, prototyping, etc.
One thing that I wonder is, how are they going to cope with the way software engineering scales? There are millions of little programs out there written by somebody's little brother that produce the weekly report just the way Bob in accounting likes them. There are tens of thousands of companies out there getting useful work done on systems that were put together out of standard components by some consultant in a couple of weeks. There are, perhaps, a couple of thousand projects out there that are complex enough that it's really worth bringing out a Real Software Engineer or two to run them.
I suspect that eventually we'll need two seperate professions, call 'em "Software Engineers" and "MCSEs" or something. It'll be kind of like working with electricity, where you've got EEs to design complicated things, and electricians that do stuff like wiring your house.
In genereal, the IEEE are a bunch of vicious out of touch old farts who have far too many ties with do nothing, know nothing academics and far too little ties with the people that actually make things work. Do they even know that most of modern HW is really SW? I suspect not....
/ co mp.org.ieee/May1996/2279.txt
These people have been so disturbed that someone could actually be an engineer and not give a crap about them that they have spent the last 20 years ignoring the SW that makes the modern world work.
http://sigda.acm.org/Archives/NewsGroupArchives
Any attempt by the IEEE to make itself more relevant will probably be primarily motivated towards lowering engineering salaries like they have "helped" do for other disciplines.
Take this personaility test.
Computer Science and computers have always been well ahead of the people that create and develop laws. IF this ever became a law, very few people would actually follow it. I mean, how many top-notched computer programmers actually have official title education? I mean, probably a quarter of the very best programmers out there started doing it BEFORE computer science even existed.
Secondly, the only possible use that this would be would be if the government or a top-tier company needed a developer to develop a fail-safe application. Let's say NASA needed an application, this might be a benchmark for them to identify talent.
Lastly, to some extent, I agree that software engineering should be come a little more structured. There is a major difference in the code style and programming style of programmers that have proper education and those that are self learned. With education, coding becomes a more structured practice. This is a valuable asset in a corporate or group environment. If a certain person write code that only he or she understands, it costs the company even more because of the greater amount of time that it takes for other people to learn his code and style. However, on the other hand, some self-learned individuals, not learning structured development styles, are able to take shortcuts or find optimizations to produce better codes. (As always, this is a generalization. There are obviously exceptions to these two rules.)
So to sum it up, this IEEE proposal would benefit schools and corporations because it creates structure in programming style. However, something like this could never become law in the same way that you need a medical license to practice law.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
oh my
science is about trying things out understanding things
Very little to with enginering
(yes they work on many of the same concepts and engineers would not exist without scientists)
engineering is boring repeatable stuff churning out things at the same standard how many software releases are of EXACTLY the same quality
arrgh
john jones
I don't see what the news here is. This has been ongoing for several years, and will probably keep on going for a while.
Too many people just cannot agree as to what the accepted Soft. Eng. body of knowledge should include. Not only that, but they're trying to cover this for everyone.... some states and provinces already have their own definitions, which drives university curriculum, but this is trying to be the body of knowledge used by EVERY soft. eng. program.
One of the aguments as to why this so hard to accomplish is because the field is still young, and keeps innovating. New languages, new algorithms, even newer applications. Other engineering disciplines benefit from the fact that they've been evolving for so much longer and that they've matured. Im sure that Civil engineering is still changing, but the fundamentals of city planning and road & bridge construction haven't changed since the Romans. Electrical engineering is younger, but the core fundamentals of electricity, magnetism, microwaves etc. have been around for a while (at least the turn of the century.) In Computer Engineering, integrated circuits (at least the theory) has been around for decades.
Software is still (comparatively) too young. Then you get academic groups fighting with commercial groups fighting with standards organisations (IEEE, ACM etc.), each with their own vested interest. There are best practices sure, but there are so many ways to write software........ comparatively, the "right" way to build a bridge should be obvious (i.e. not the way where it falls apart.)
IEEE is thinking about all that money it could collect from Microsoft! I'd LMAO if Microsoft software could be said to have been written by Amateurs.
A certified engineer can still make a mistake.
Certified software is tested and putatively immutable, and you can always throw more testing at it if you think it needs it.
DO-178B procedures require that all software designs and implementations be reviewed and tested, the tests reviewed, and the reviews reviewed, by different engineers--or companies--wherever practicable. And it comes with different levels of certification, to allow cost reduction where lower levels of risk are involved.
--Blair
(Note to web surfers, if you want to go to yahoo.com, say, to find standards links, do not mis-type the domain as "yaho.com". Trust me on this. I also advise everyone to use Panicware's free Pop-up Stopper. This node is getting wrapped right now.)
As a future Engineer I'd just like to inform you that such a body already exists. In Ontario it's the PEO - the Professional Engineers of Ontario.
You write certification tests, you pay your license fees and you can put your name on a system verifying that its design is correct and according to current knowledge and that you've tested it to acceptable standards. If you put your name on a system that fails, you could lose your license. If people were endagered by the failure of your system you're almost guaranteed to never work as an Engineer again.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
- Codifying a set of "best practicies" that, when applied, assure a solid
product.
- Codifying educational programs that teach these best practices.
- Certifying people who graduate from the educational process as "Software
Engineers".
The big problem with this idea is step 1: Sure, we have best practices, but they do not assure a solid product. By far, the highest assurance practice to date for developing working software is to make sure the developers have a lot of talent and dedication. There are software engineering best practices, but when goobers apply them, they are fully capable of producing bloated non-working crap. This is characteristic of an art, not an engineering discipline.It is very nice that people are sufficiently concerned about software quality and its impact on the real world (e.g. comp.risks). But this in no way means that we actually have best practices that will assure that mediocre developers can produce working product. Wishing for it (or mandating it) will not make it so.
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for Purchase
I did a quick search in the list and found very few people from big name universities, with all the four big names in the field (software engineering is not my cup of te) that I know missing.
This makes me wonder if this process has any credibility then... Anybody out there who can comment (intelligently) on this?
There are fundamental differences between software "engineering" and what is generally referred to as engineering. When you engineer and build a bridge, you don't solve a new problem - you apply an existing knowledge base to solve a problem that has already been solved, thousands of times before. You can't take an existing solution, say, the Brooklyn bridge, and just copy it at close to zero cost. With software, if the problem was solved once before, solving it again is a lot easier. If the problem you're looking at is close enough to something that's been done before, you can just use the existing solution. Need a word processing package with spell checking and support for embedded graphics? Just buy a copy, or download. That's one of the reasons for the popularity of scripting languages - they encapsulate a set of pre-existing solutions to some common problems, and allow users to apply those solutions in an easy to use way.
Software engineering deals mostly with building things that weren't built before. when work is duplicated, it is mostly for technical (your Java solution can't use C libraries) or political (licensing, NIH) reasons. What's lacking is well defined interfaces for specific application domains, not certification programs. Such interfaces exist when they're appropriate (POSIX, for example), but in the general case, they're counter productive.
Software engineering should be an art.
No one should need a license to make software!
As much as it would be nice to have it as a science, and as much as it is a science, its also an art.
To anyone who promotes open source, They know that its an art.
Its just my opinion, Software engineering is an art and a science, but its more important to us to have it as an art.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Creating Software in fact is a discipline requiring more artistic than mathematic skills; the best analogy in the "old" world is the Architect who designs houses; he also needs to be familiar with math and needs to know a lot about physical properties of different materials, but the real issue is to create a building where people like to live in,which requires to know more about people and what makes them feel comfortable, more about the history of art than the history of stone and steel.
Creating Software is about making a computer useful to people. Software is not for Computers; they feel equally comfortable with any piece of code; software is about modeling real world entities, and about creating interfaces to the human mind.
Even if you write a protocol stack or a kernel, something no normal user is exposed to, you are creating an interface that makes it possible for another programmer's mind to deal with it.
So it is not the silicon side of software, but the human mind side that makes the difference.
And now throwing in the multi-media aspects of today's most software it becomes obvious that in fifty years creating software will be considered as much an engineering discipline like making a movie today is considered as an engineering discipline because it is an opto-chemical process.
Btw: ever seen somthing funny, beautyful, lovely or cool come out IEEE ?
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
When I read the resume what I care about is projects the prospective employee partricipated in and his role in these projects. If someone spent their time not on writing cool code but on getting stupid certification, its a major turn-off.
I dont want software engineering to become some esoteric type of thing like quantum physics, or math, I want it to be something everyone can take part in.
Thats what open source is all about, allowing anyone with knowledge to contribute.
We shouldnt even have "licenses" and so on and so forth because in the real world, its not how many licenses you have, but what you can contribute that matters.
I say its an art and a science, and we shouldnt swing one way or the other, but if people are pushing it toward science, then i'm going to push it toward art, and i'm sure anyone whos a programmer for open source will agree that its an art, unless they work for microsoft and then perhaps its a science.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Canada already has software engineering as a true engineering discipline. McMaster University which I currently attend in S.E. has a program that has been accredited by the Professional Engineers Ontario. Our department is led by Dr. David Parnas, one of the fathers of software engineering (read the Mythical Man-Month by F. P. Brooks or Software Fundamentals by D. Parnas) Many other canadian universities are following with their own S.E. programs including the very strong in computer science University of Waterloo, the world renowned McGill University of Montreal and many others.
Why would I want to be lumped together with a bunch of stodgy old electrical or mechanical dweebs?
Hell, if it weren't for the likes of us, those other disciplines would still be using a slide rule and pencil...
Asimov (I think) said: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
Ergo, I'm a magician!
This space for rent
This idea is just plain stupid. Its an attempt to make programming as esoteric as other scientific fields.
Problem is, we need more programmers not less, why make it hard as hell now to become one by requiring people go to special schools like a doctor has to go to medical school, and requiring they pass all these overly difficult tests ?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Passing a test doesn't make you a good programmer. Being trained as an Engineer makes you a good designer of systems, no matter what type of system you're designing. If this system happens to be a computer program, so be it.
Would you feel more secure if the building you were living in were designed by an Engineer or less? What about the software that drives the pacemaker for your heart? I know I'd feel a lot safer if an Engineer had designed the system that was keeping me from having a heart attack in the middle of a busy road.
Besides - The type of software we're talking about is critical systems software that's usually written by Engineers anyway.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
Take my friend, we'll call him Paul.
.com industry reached market saturation so incredibly quickly.
1) Paul has never gone to university.
2) Paul and conventional schooling don't like each other very much.
3) Paul is a very highly paid programmer with a very highly prestigious Game Developer company with a job that 90% of the coders in this city would _kill_ for.
4) Paul is probably one of the more knowledgeable and brilliant coders in this city.
Now, why should Paul be forced to endure a discipline simply so that he can get certification so that people know that he is a good coder. People know anyways. Why should there be a standardized system?
One of the nice things about the coder/hacker/programmer/computer geek profession is that schooling isn't _everything_. It is quite possible that someone with an able enough mind can self-teach themselves anything they'd learn in a university. They don't really need a lab or a gigantic library that is only accessible to University students. I think I've touched the "assignment lab" up at SFU about twice in the three-year tenure of my attendance in Comp-Sci courses. Everything can be done with your own resources and your own research. This profession has never really been one that follows convention because, well, it's not a conventional profession. Innovation and progression from normal societal standards is what keeps computer programming and all the related fields dynamic. It's the reason why the
Anyways. That's my rant. Feel free to dissect it and flame away... Any disagreements are highly welcome.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Don't you have to have a accredited Engineering degree to even be able to write the P. Eng. exam? I have a Computer Science degree (B.Math) and if my assertion is correct, I couldn't be a P. Eng. if I wanted to be one.
Having a license does not make you a better programmer.
A better programmer may not have a license.
The source code is what decides how good of a programmer you are, its not like driving where they need to prove you are a better programmer, just look at the code.
If the license for being a programmer requires you write specific programs, THIS would be just fine i suppose, however it still your skill level.
And if the license is what i expect, its a stupid test which asks random questions about random stuff which most people dont know, so people who memorize the text books become the programmers and not the people with the actual skill.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
That's why I suggested mandatory recertifications. Perhaps something besides a test can be used. What is the entire body of Joh Hacker's previous work? What has been written since the last recert board?
I also don't like exams. Too artificial for me.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
It will create a bunch of text book programmers who dont have real experience but who know the text book inside and out.
This is stupid.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'm a fairly experienced system architect as well as faculty in the CS/COE department of a major university, yet I have never received a degree in CS or engineering, nor any professional certifications in engineering. I fail to see how these would make me a better developer.
In fact, I've often found that my lack of formal background is a help rather than a hindrance. I'm often able to think outside of the traditional engineers paradigm. Because of that, I often see other developers being surprised at something I though up, that they never would have tried just because their training told them that sort of thing doesn't work. Since I work in distributed middleware and DB research, coming up with new things is kind of the point.
-Hobo
--Stupidity is Self Curing!
You just dont get it. Programming is not like building a house.
When you build a house, you cannot freely learn from millions of other houses built by taking it apart peice by peice and putting it back together.
Programming allows ANYONE to learn on their own and become a good software engineer.
Passing a test wont prove that you are good, It just proves you are good at passing tests.
The proof should be in your source code.
Perhaps as a test, requiring people write several programs and submit them to a review group, (similar to the driving test) so people can SEE they have skill, would actually be a better idea.
But to give a standard TEST, it doesnt come down to skill, it comes down to how much of the text book you memorized.
Its stupid.
The source code should prove someones worth, not a test.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The primary advantage to such an endevor is the creation of a set of reference standards. However, deeming these standards as the basis for licensing and claiming this to be a science is grossly mistaken. Science at its best is an art. And art, as an act of creation of something heretofor unknown, can't be proscribed by law. Please, codify software engineering- create a guild a union, an association- but don't subject it to the exclusionary class wars possible through selective licensing.
Some things you can test with an exam, some things you cant.
You cant have someone build a house and judge their house so you must give them an exam.
Computer programming is diffrent, you can force someone to build a program and grade their program, if they do well they are an engineer, if not, then they arent.
This means a program with no bugs, which is designed based on certain standards.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I don't see going from an art to a science as a step forward. Actually, I see it as a way to severely limit a field as creative as software development. I was trained to see programming as an art. Code is poetry that instructs a computer to do something.
Regardless of that point, the idea of having to get a license really pisses me off. I used to be employable without a college degree. Since last fall nobody will even interview me. Now I'm wasting two years and thousands of dollars in a small university where I'm learning next to nothing, just so I can get a damn B.S. so someone might hire me. I don't want anybondy telling me when I graduate in 2003 that I have to spend two more years to get some license.
Mi klopodas varbi por Esperanto.
This is genius. Yes I agree with you, the answer is to certify the software itself, not the engineer making it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This as been recognised for a while now by the Institute of Engineers, Australia.
See here for a loose definition of a software engineer. A list of accredited Software Engineering courses can be found here. Its part of the Engineering faculty at almost all major Universities in Australia.
--
0x00
Just a Soft Student.
That's about the only merit to it. No other skilled occupation has ever had to endure what is happening with the software field, in terms of companies crying about shortages when their real purpose is simply to lower wages.
Professionalization would keep standards higher in many ways- by keeping people out who are little more than code monkeys, but more importantly via the creation of a bona fide association with some real political power.
Yes, you can fix your own radios. You'd be allowed to write your own software. But would you be allowed to write it commercially?
Not a problem. An un-degreed SE would be "allowed" to write commercial software, just as an undegreed EE would be "allowed" to design commercial hardware. (Ever hear of a fellow named Wozniak? Or Dell, for that matter)
Professional engineering licensing/accreditation issues tend to be relevant when government or military contracts are at stake. For instance, no municipality is going to accept a bridge-design proposal from some random dude calling himself a "civil engineer." Likewise, you're not going to work for JPL or NASA unless you can show the necessary professional credentials to indicate competency with metric and English units, for example.
It's true that a few talented engineers have been held back by a lack of degrees and licenses. After WWII, Wernher von Braun had to send off for a mail-order doctorate degree before Congress would take him seriously. But for the most part, this action on IEEE's part isn't something that should scare anyone, IMHO. The IEEE is a rather toothless organization, and no commercial interests are going to let them threaten the supply of talent, accredited or otherwise.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
ACM's position is that our state of knowledge and practice in software engineering is too immature to warrant licensing. Moreover, Council felt licensing would be ineffective in providing assurances about software quality and reliability.
There was a reason that I wrote a book about Software Craftsmanship The whole idea of applying a mechanical metaphor to software development is inappropriate.
Author, "Software Craftsmanship The New Imperative" Addison-Wesley (C) 2002
I took a 32-month intensive IT course which was, at times, very hectic. Oh wait, scratch that, I do have a degree! Do give us some boo hoo sob story about changing careers late in life and working so hard. No were in my programs outline did it say you had to start your degree at in your youth. Save us the sob story next time.
Coders are fine people. But few of them interface with users, management, and the other organizations who are stakeholders in the outcome of a large software project. Instead, the "interfacing" seems to be left to suits, project managers who don't actually understand any of the coding. We're left with a gap to fill there.
The way I see a software engineer is as filling thag gap. A software engineer can sit down with users and draw up specs and requirements; he can analyze and design, and then code, and then test, debug, and deliver. He may not do all of these all of the time, but he does have the ability, and when he sees that one of these needs isn't being met, he should also have the authority to make sure that they are done, otherwise the project will fail (like 90% of software projects currently fail!)
We do need folks like this in the business, and we also need the business to recognize the necessity for such software engineers. Getting accreditation is one important step in achieving these goals.
"this is a major step forward - turning software engineering from an art into a science."
No. It is a major step toward turning software engineering from an art into a trade.
If software engineering requires a license what becomes of Free Software written by unlicensed individuals such as myself? Would we be expected to pay a licensed engineer a couple of hundred bucks to approve it? Would you require all Debian developers to get their licenses?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If you allow anyone to program professionally, then you must be prepared for more terrible code.
And please spare me the anecdotes about the English major who is the world's best programmer - we don't architect our socirty on corner cases. Added to which, there would be ample opportunity for non-CS grads to gain the certification where it to become required.
Are you new to programming?
So why not let it stand as a marketing device? If you want software from the lay-hacker, you can choose to buy from him. If you choose to buy it from the certified hacker, you may do so freely.
Within a decade the marketing clout of the certification (if it is worth anything) would put the uncertified hackers out of business. Its just human nature - we look for a degree in the dentists office, don't we?
No, Microsoft says you are an MCSE. They make no attempt to generalize your skillset beyond that which is required to pass their certification.
The way a "real" engineering discipline works:
I am a mechanical engineer (MEng Mech Eng.). I passed lots of tests (barely, I only got a 2.2). But even to get that qualification, I _also_ had to complete team and individual industrial-style projects + have them reviewed. (Designing a recumbent pedal vehicle, and a streamlined body for a vehicle.)
Even so, I'm not really a fully qualified mechanical engineer - I'm not chartered. (I probably never will be, since I started developing software instead, but that's another story.)
I don't know how it works in America, but the way you fully qualify as an engineer (get your charter) in Britain and Ireland _is_ by the mechanical engineering equivalent of writing several programs and submitting them to a review group - the IMechE. After a few years as a "rookie" mechanical engineer in the industry (usually with a "mentor", an engineering guru to guide you on your way), you submit details of the projects you have worked on for review, and have an unfun interview. If they're up to scratch, you get a charter. The academic tests don't really mean much, beyond a certain basic level of competence, unless you're sticking in academia to do research.
Just as I can happily write programs without being a qualified software engineer, plenty of people can happily design machines without being a mechanical engineer. But qualified mechanical engineers will probably do a better job, and be allowed do it where people's lives are at stake - note how most software says things like "not to be used to run a nuclear reactor" in the license?
Also, mechanical engineers don't go off and reinvent the wheel from scratch either - we don't re-derive the Navier-Stokes equations each time we use them, and, when we're designing something, we used a (gasp!) "component-based approach" - ordering off-the-shelf parts and slotting them together. It keeps the cost down that way, and is a lot like component/ OO programming with a rich standard API. Kinda like writing Java applications, in fact (what I've actually spent the past while doing). Building and Civil engineers use a similar approach for... building houses...
Programming _is_ like building a house. Generally, you're slotting together lots of components that people have already designed. A builder doesn't make his own bricks - bricks come in a selection of standard sizes from the brick factory.
So, why not a similar approach for life-critical Software Engineering?
Choice of masters is not freedom.
For electrical engineers, the elegance may be in minimzing the number of transistors in a design.
For chemical engineers, the elegance may come on the form of the safety or usefulness of the byproducts of a reaction.
All engineering fields value elegance in method and design. The notion that "art" separates programming from other engineering endeavors is bogus.
Its ridiculous to assert that there are no means by which you can qualify and test programmers. Haven't you ever applied for a job? Didn't they ask you any programming questions? Did you take the Computer Science GRE? There are numerous excellent methods available for ascertaining some basic metrics about the competency of a programmer.
Obviously there would be no prohibitions on non-CS grads getting certified. Why would there be? CS grads may have some inherent advantages, but I've never heard of a certification proposal that requires a CS degree.
COMDEX SPRING and WINDOWS WORLD 95
Power Panel - "What's Wrong with Software Development"
** In The U.S. Only **
$81 Billion = 31% of software development gets cancelled before complete
$59 Billion = 53% of software development has cost over-runs of 189%
16% success - project success and failure ratio
61% customer requested features and functions make it in
Maintenance and repair is where most of the U.S. dollars are going, instead of new, better, easier to use software.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN - Sept. 1994
Article - "Software's Chronic Crisis"
Mary M. Shaw of Carnegie Mellon University, observes a parallel between chemical engineering evolution and software engineering evolution. However, this evolution has not made the connection between science and commercialization required to establish a consistent experimental foundation for professional software engineering.
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Pretty much there is a difference between what is called a Software Engineer today and what a genuine software Engineeer is. That difference is between what is a majority of psuedo Software engineering or the skill of reinvention vs. limited cases of genuine software engineering in the form of isolated examples of algorithims, data structures, compiler construction.
What this says, is that most of what goes on today is not software engineering, but rather doing again what has already been established. Or what should be better automated so that even the typical end user could much more easily "program".
It is the creation of such automaton that makes programming easier for everyone, that is where genuine software engineering has it's place today.
Such a direction as is generally described by IBMs autonomic computing direction only not with such a stiff white collar high pay end user perspective.
The product of genuine software engineering should not be the final product but the tools used by everyone to do what in essence is programming, that of automating what one needs to automate in order to make their use of computers more productive. And I'm talking about the end user doing what they know they need, not the psuedo engineer/programming reinventing something again not quite what the user wants to again sell it to the user.
The science of Software creation, the practice of automation creation by the end users is what the goal is of genuine software engineering should technically be.
A structural engineer figures out and creates the blue prints. But it is the builder that then use that blue print to create the structures. Sometimes in the process of building, even finding errors in the engineering, which are then feed-back to the engineer to verify and correct.
Personally I believe what I've described within a Responce to a USPTO RFC, as the Virtual Interaction Configuration, is that "expermental foundation" needed and refered to by Mary Shaw, as well as being the specific configuration of functionality and details of, which is absent in IBMs presentation.
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Your statements are well thought out and valid, unfortunately the group-think of /. is so peversely self-contradictory that it really makes you wonder where common sense went. You see, /.'s rail against certification every time an article comes up suggesting it, but then they spend the rest of their time bitching about Microsoft's crappy software and how horrible it is that they "get away with it".
mathematics falls under the domain of free speech, and so does programming, except where it violates local or national or international emissions codes. mathematics doesn't have emisssions, except possibly from enlightened brainwaves, and there is no such thing as a mathematics license, only proof. some of the world's best mathematicians approached the subject from non-traditional angles and revolutionized math and the whole world. and the criterion of proof was never subject to any political definition of what was convenient to the general populace, although a good proof generally served the whole world well. software engineering is not a branch of science any more than math; they are realms of thought and philosophy. and philosophy is not a licensable profession, like math and computer software programming.
What is so difficult about going through Stroustrup's book and picking three or four topics per chapter and formulating questions from them? Some could be true/false, some multiple choice, and some requiring you to "write" code snippets. It seems pretty straightforward.
The problem is when most "expert" groups discuss this topic, they typically look for a test they could get perfect in, based on the fault assumption that their perfect mastery of C++ must result in a perfect score.
Flamebait? What are you smoking?
Moderator, you should visit www.gnu.org and do some reading. This is a social revolution!
You are correct to a degree, but only for some types of S/W systems. For example, my word processor is artfully designed for me to intuitively make the most out of it's capabilities. Great, but it crashes due to sloppy, 'artful' practices. Ok, it's a word processor, I lose a bit of work...annoying, but not critical.
Now for the systems that I hope were not designed in a purely 'artful' manner: Aircraft control systems, my microwave oven, the telecom switches that connect me to emergency services, chemical/nuclear process control systems, automotive control systems, traffic light control systems, fire control system on a smart bomb, nuclear attack early warning systems, pacemaker control system, computerized medical equipment (life support, anaylsis equipment...etc.), electronic infrastucture for commerce...etc..
These are all S/W application areas that demand an engineered solution. That means that the system performs the required functionality correctly, meets the required level of reliability, and does not perform unintended actions in either normal or extrordinary circumstances.
Artistic qualities do play a role in design & implementation, but it is not the only quality required to build & test such systems.
Could you imagine someone 'artistically' testing such a system? "Well, the system 'felt' right...I think we should ship it." "Oh, it failed! It killed 300 people! Tsk."
Last word; Programming != S/W engineering.
Most jobs out there are governed by a set of minimum standards, and, imporantly, responsibilities. Name me any company or organisation that *isn't* liable when they do something wrong.
Except for software producers. In a broad sense, programmers aren't really liable for what they write; if its wrong, write a patch, hope it works (I know thats generalising, but you get the idea).
Having a well-established and well-respected (how is IEEE or ACM not well respected), *legally binding* set of standards will ensure that people who write sloppy and badly written software will be liable for their (in)action.
This is a good thing for everyone. If you take it to its extreme, it'd be enough to put these guys out of business for shoddy work practices.
We've all heard the argument of how a car manufactuer would never sell you a half-finished car; why should software be any different etc etc.
(How this scores 3 is a mystery)
Computer SCIENCE is very much part of mathematics. Denying it just proves that you slept through class, or avoided taking the hard classes because they had math in them.
Computer SCIENCE comes up with tools like VDM and Z (formal methods) that can be applied by ENGINEERS to verify that the software that was built.
Application Software construction is very much like movie-making already. You usually have a director (architect/designer), lighting and camera-crews (database and graphics experts) and so on. However, they all use tools like cameras, lights, and cranes (compilers, database engines, Open-GL drivers). These tools are usually certified by ENGINEERS who have used the processes that SCIENCE gave them.
Beautiful stuff does come out of the IEEE. 802.11b for example. Wi-Fi or Airport the marketing departments are calling it. Quite popular these days, apparently.
imho what they're trying to do by introducing
a certification is not a question of increasing
security and methodology, it's a matter of control.
once they can tell who's a certified software
engineer and who's not, they'll hold the entire
software industy by the balls.
The danger is that this drifts into a closed
corporatism like the guilds in medieval europe,
worse: it could be that "sponsors" (microsoft?)
direct which criteria you have to meet to be
certified
And last, since such certifications can't really
be hard, it could drift into a buyable title
just like you can read ads "buy your Ph.D."
so basically, we should closely watch who's
going to decide how it works.
Moderation was suposed to make comments like your vanish completely from my screen. Oh well, I guess its back to the drawing board.
Ok, faced with a stream, some wood and maybe some rope, most of us could build a bridge to take us across the stream.
Maybe face a larger stream, or perhaps a river. Again, most of us could probably design a bridge that at least we alone would feel confident in crossing.
But how many of us could build a bridge that not only we are confident to cross, but the general public are confident to cross, the local government is happy to certify as structurally sound and compliant with all bridge building regulations.
To design and build such a bridge requires a professional engineer, not a Microsoft Bridge 2000 monkey.
I think.
Engineers design.
DESIGN != PROGRAMMING
Technicians do all the work and Engineer gives direction, inspect it, etc. He/She then takes there stamp out of their pocket and puts it on the blueprints (that a technician drew) and stamps it. Now they are accountable even if they didn't draw the thing.
It would work for software. I suspect EE's might already stamp source code lists for things like routers, space shuttles, medical radiation machines, etc.
By Steve McConnel. I used to fear licensing software engineers until McConnel explained what being an engineer *really* means.
You can still write software, even for commercial purposes. In fact, there would be many situations why a sotware engineer is not what you need.
In any given engineering shop, there's only a handful of licensed engineers. There are still other engineers there who do the work, but the licensed engineer oversees the work and ensures due dilligence and best practices are used. In electronics, there are electronic technicians who don't have engineering degrees who design electronics. Instead, those places have a single licensed engineer who will oversee the final design and inspect it.
Do not fear software engineering: embrace it!
For the record, I do not qualify for licensing as a software engineer, but a licensed software engineer wouldn't mind hiring me to work on his team.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
The goal is failure avoidance.
There are software engineering best practices, but when goobers apply them, they are fully capable of producing bloated non-working crap.
I think you're blowing smoke. What are these best practices that produce crap? No one said best practices would make stupidity obsolete, so please don't tell me about people misapplying or misusing well-defined practices.
It is very nice that people are sufficiently concerned about software quality and its impact on the real world (e.g. comp.risks). But this in no way means that we actually have best practices
The two are completely independent in any case...so what are you saying? Obviously we know some best practices in software engineering...don't use GOTO, comment your code, use a debugger...come on, are you telling me that in fifty years of programming we haven't learned anything?????
So are you implying no "certified" software engineers work at Microsoft?
Does this mean IEEE will control all development , will this effect every country that the IEEE are in. what are the full implications.
Just like every other profession, there are good and bad people. I'm sure people have come across good mechanics with no certification, but could tell you what's wrong with your car in 10 minutes. Then there are other shops that use a bunch of high tech gear only to replace a bunch of good parts to make more money. There will always be greedy people who get into a profession thinking "I can make a quick buck and retire."
Sure having a standard makes it easier for non-technical people to get some assurance a person is capable of doing the job. But then again, look at the SAT. There are tons of people who Memorize for the test and do great, but couldn't think themselves out of a hole. Rather than look at the real core of the problem, yet another organization is trying to make money by telling others what to do. Instead of addressing the problem in realistic terms, it's just another bad paint job that will rust with a little bit of weather.
Architects don't build buildings... They just draw pretty pictures on paper and make mock up models.
To build the building you have tradesmen who pound the nails, weld the steel, put in the windows, etc.
You also have persons called Construction Engineers and Material Engineers. You know what they do? They tell the architect that your a damn fool if you think we can build a 40 story building out of balsa wood and push pins.
Programming is most certainly not equivalent to architecture.
Does it sound like "responsibility" here?
:-)
Well, the truth is that this very word is hihgly abused. Possibly it is meant to be some sort of moral responsibility, some quite illusionary one. It has then to be objected.
The only decent form of responsibility is when you say "Okay, it is me who made this, and it is me who is to be honoured if it works for people, and it is me who is to be executed if it fails".
Even this is not all of the truth; the truth is there exists "equal amount of responsibility". It is possible to define it as something one is ready to loose in case of failure of the actions he bears responsibility of.
Ironically, "the only decent form" is indeed very little (how much does it cost to bear and breed a human?) Since human beings cannot be responsible for big entities, what is a really just form of societal/collective responsibility? How can human beings which form the society ensure that they are being justly coerced to fullfill such responsibility in case of failure?
Well, this is all theory. But I said all this to justify the idea that certification is by no means a way to make people do their job well. The only way is to breed and to teach them; they should do their job well not because they are certified, but because they fear of being sinful and eager to save in the most religious way
More of this. Programming is a dirty and merciless activity. Only disproportinally little reward can one expect for the pains taken to produce good software, for there are too many seekers.
What should the better ones do?
The next thing you know, people who write will want to be known as 'book engineers.'
Hardware is engineering. Software is simply telling the machine what to do. An engineer designs ACS. An engineer does not write the specifications to mill the parts created by the ACS, although he might be involved in the *LOW LEVEL* programming that controls the physics of the thing.
If there is to be a software engineer, it should be limited to the software the directly interacts with physical systems (ie, ACS).
As always, just my opinion.
SCH - Aerospace Engineer.
is being taken in Ontario.
Really, most engineers start out as engineering students...
from the site:
Accreditation of the Software Engineering progam
Waterloo's Software Engineering program is designed to be accredited as both an engineering and a computer science program, but it cannot be officially assessed before Fall 2005, which is the final year of the first Software Engineering class, and it cannot be accredited until after the first class graduates (Spring 2006). The first class whose program is successfully assessed will be considered to have graduated from an accredited program, even though that program is not officially accredited until after the class graduates.
Twa gays were travelling by air, when one of them said,
-Hey, let's join the "Mile High Club"; let's fuck right here!
-Are you crazy? With all those people watching?
-Oh, never mind, they're all asleep, let me show you!
He stood up and said loudly:
-Please, anybody here got a cigarrette?
Since no one answered, the other one agreed to fuck in the airplane cabin.
A half-hour later, a flight attendant went around the cabin checking if everything was OK, when she noticed an old man who was shivering from cold. She brought him a blanket and said:
-Here, mister, you don't need to be cold, just ask and I'l bring you anything you need.
He answered,
-Look miss, a young man there asked for a cigarrette and someone came and fucked his ass. What do you think he'd do if I asked for a blanket?!
Yes. You have to have an Engineering degree to become a P. Eng. You have to first be trained as an Engineer before you can be allowed to become one professionally. (Makes sense, yes?)
Computer Engineering's focus is profoundly different than Computer Science's.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
No "certified" software engineers work anywhere, there is no certification. Thats the whole point of this article.
that the site is slashdotted pretty much sums up the "body of knowledge". =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think you're missing the point. It's not about programming, it's about design. You can't be an Engineer unless you've been trained as an Engineer.
The test has nothing about programming. The test is about ethics, professionality, creativity, and competence. They aren't testing your abilites.
Look at the Professional Engineers of Ontario website.
Source code has nothing to do with it.
You cannot become a good Engineer by experience alone. You can't learn good design by looking at other peoples' source code. You need to be able to turn a critical eye on the structure of your program.
A well engineered program does the following, in the following order:
Input
Calculation
Output
That's it. All the subroutines follow the same model. You can't learn proper structure by experience alone.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
Don't try to dodge the question. "Certified" in quotations meaning do you think Microsoft doesn't hire people who would pass the "certification" if one was available. Do you think the Microsoft software would suddenly become high quality if these people were "certified"?
Please define what is Computer Science.
First you need that Engineering degree, and they are really nasty about transferring credit or allowing courses to be challenged. Basically, figure at least 3 years as a full-time university student if you already have very relevant training.
But then you need 4 (IIRC) years as basically an apprentice, working full time under the direct supervision of an accredited engineer. Naturally, this is, "We can end your career before it even begins!" internship-type employment.
So we're talking about a bare minimum 7-year investment (more likely 8 or 9) before they'll even look at you. These restrictions have been tightening up, requiring larger and larger investments in time, over the last decades, and I expect it to continue in this manner.
It seems to me that all of our professional organizations are slowly becoming old-fashioned guilds, organized less for the benefit of the general public and more for the members. Organizations in which one doesn't become a full member who can work unsupervised until middle age, assuming one commits oneself in one's youth. They already have the protection of government, so entrenched that nobody ever seems to suggest weakening their monopolies.
Do we really need a Bar Association? Do you think lawyers are more ethical, more beneficial to society because there's a government-granted monopoly to its members on arguing the law on others' behalf? Do you think your area's medical association is doing the best possible job producing competent, efficient doctors with no competition or alternative of any kind?
How many professionals are just wielders of required rubber stamps? How many brilliant young potential innovators are slowly crushed into mediocre clock-watchers, who have been shown again and again that putting your time in, looking respectable, and covering your ass pays off better than doing your job well and advancing the state of the art?
I think that far too few people question the value, competence, and good faith of professional organizations. They're just accepted as natural features of a well-run society, assumed to be the best interface to highly specialized skills without an active evaluation.
I look at them, and see the gradual calcification, then downfall of our society. I see never moving beyond asphalt roads and cars that move at 60 MPH, never moving a viable population off the planet, never extending the average human lifespan beyond 100 years.
I hate to see people talking about moving this kind of influence into software. It's one thing to run competing private organizations that certify certain skills, it's quite another to start legally requiring certification from a particular one, giving it monopoly status. Let alone ceasing to question whether it should keep that status.
I am surprised that noone in this thread has yet mentioned the book 'After the Gold Rush'. I suggest every serious software engineer read it. Whether you love or hate the idea of licensing people as 'engineers', the book gives you a lot of food for thought on the subject.
The provincial Engineering boards here are (more or less) clear on the fact that Computer Science is not Software Engineering. The Engineering designation implys that you are competent in the foundations of general Engineering disaplines -- the foundatations of Mechanics, Physics (including mixed system behaviour) Chemistry, Statistics and Calculus, Safety protocols, Electric Circuits and systems. To be an engineer means that you have specialized in a particular field, but have basic knowledge in each of the other fields.
I personally disagree with the article posted in that it is indeed implying that if you can program, and organize a project, that you should be called an Engineer, when indeed you merely have a background in Computer Science. There is a reason why the two programs co-exist -- computer scientists have a more in depth knowledge at what they do, they focus even more on the project and realization of that. Software Engineers (supposedly) have a large amount of knowledge about software design and realization in various languages, but also in hardware and custom aspects that may vary how the software should be devloped. In my opinion: I think that the heirarchical structure of having the Engineering team initially model and study the problem at hand, and using the techniques learnt, begin to form a solution to the task at hand, how to lay it out, acknowledging possible coding problems and/or other complications that may arise, and initiating , delegating the tasks and keeping them on schedule -- but leaving most of the indepth coding and realization work to those in Computer Science, since that is what they have went out and learnt to do.
This seems to have turned out slightly more rant-y than I had anticipated, but the exhaultation of Computer Science into Engineering shouldn't be done mearly because they are creating. And that because people in the US are calling themselves "Software Engineers" (which in Canada would be illegal unless they are actually a P.Eng) that shouldn't mean that their Computer Science background should qualify them as an Engineer nor that the Engineering society should embrace this fad and officially recognize those individuals as Engineers.
I think that there are significant problems with relying on legal issues or tests alone for establishing or maintaining requirements for software developers, coders, managers, database people, etc...
There are a number of theories regarding why software fails. There are many studies, papers, etc... I have even been involved in a few of them. I don't know of any study or organization who feels that - at the very heart of the problem - is a shortage of licensing. At best, some sort of licensing -- might -- be of some benefit, but I don't believe that should be the first or foremost solution towards addressing software quality problems.
Many years ago, Scientific American magazine had an article on software; this article cited complexity as the reason software fails. I disagree. There are arguments about how complex software is - the difficulties associated with testing all computation branches and [execution] flows through a program (exponention, NP-C problems), testing software and module linkages, data typing and related matters, and many other issues. My experience and understanding is that most software problems relate to poorly thought out requirements, poorly documented changes, work done under time pressure, and a host of what I will call "fundamental" failings from software developers.
I think that advanced training in software - degrees with math components, and formal software engineering training can be genuinely helpful. A great problem is organizations that do not know or care about the consequences of flawed work going out the door.
Ultimately, with or without any form of licensing, I see one major step that would help software quality - ACCOUNTABILITY. There must be legal liability for software that doesn't work, or is purely dangerous. The onus must be on the producers of software to do the job properly.
I know software can be large, and can be complex - but it also often sloppy, poorly thought out, and problems are considered post-release headaches.
My presentation at H2K (Hackers on Planet Earth, 2000) addressed some of these issues. The presentation focused on Ethics in Military and Civilian Software Development. You can find this online from http://www.2600.com, and then following the link to the presentation. I have other papers that discuss this and related issues, also on my web site.
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
Firstly, I made no claims of my own regarding the quality of Microsoft code. That said,Microsoft software has improved. Drastically. Its the crap they've had on the market for ten years that is the source of angst.
Creating Software is not Engineering
Not true. That's a generalization that doesn't apply to even *most* cases. Creating software is not only coding I think would be a more appropriate statement.
One application of software that *REALLY* needs engineering is mission critical software. Software that controls missiles, planes, sattelite, shuttles, pace makers, medical equipment, nuclear reactor control systems, etc.
Without rigourous engineering, logic proofed specifications (using theorem provers like PVS or IMPS) and structured design from requirements to implementation where the implementation agrees with the requirements, and some other fundamental software concepts that I forget, it is practically impossible to design mission critical software without knowing for sure that it won't break. As my teacher often say, testing will find bugs, but it doesn't prove that the software doesn't have bugs. Only formal verification can do this.
Two examples where proper software engineering could have saved a lot of money:
1. Intel's first 586 pentium chip bug that couldn't divide properly every once in a while.
2. Ariane space rocket that had to be destroyed because of improper type checking in the software.
The kind of software that controls those needs engineering because large amounts of money are involved and sometimes humans lives depend on it.
And I don't want to put down computer science, but CS people don't often get the engineering education required to be able to design this kind of software. And that does NOT mean they don't know how to code. Which brings me to the point that software engineering certification shouldn't be given out like MSCE. It's like asking a construction worker to design and supervise building a bridge.
If bridges, buildings, planes, cars, etc. need engineering, why software made to make run planes, neuclear reactors, pace makers, etc. wouldn't?
Pretending that "software engineering" is "engineering" also doesn't make it so. Most of the practices described in the document are popular in only a narrow segment of the industry. Teir use is not supported by any credible, measurable quantities. Nobody really understands where and how software engineering is practiced in the real world.
Creating a voluntary "IEEE certified software engineer" program may not be a bad idea--it would be like an "MCSE" for a different market segment. But making a program like this mandatory for software development or computer science education would be a very bad idea, in my opinion. Most of the software we use today would not exist in any form if SWEBOK practices had been in place over the last few decades.
so the idea is that if software engineers have to be licenced, then when i want to do some softwaredesign, i must pay somebody a shit load of money to wave a wand over my haed and say "you are a enjinear now!."
forgive me, but forcing people to need a licence to write anything was something a brought up a long time ago because i thought it was rediculous. now people are seriously saying that we should licence speech?
the idea of a standard repository would not be a terrible idea. iw ould love to see something like this, but heres is how i would want it done:
1. no BS membership, knowledge should be free. its not like they will have paid people for the knowledge, so i can't be expected to pay either, not even if the payment is in the form of my email address being sold.
2. it needs to be set up properly. cross-referncing language specifics stuff with fundimental concepts, and rudimentary ideas.
3. easy to navigate on any browser. those who do not have J. Q. Webmater's favorite browser should not be excluded. remember lots of blind people rely on text browsers.
4. it must be maitained. on a volenteer basis (so that it can never be shut down with any ease), people should maintain the information contained. its no goodif its not up to date.
5. it must play music from my favorite early 80's video game while i'm at the page, but only when i'm in a good mood.
my gut says this is another really cool idea that will either never happen, or be perverted along the way for the sake of money.
Are you sure you know what this program does?
...
You haven't specified your assumptions, your the libraries you've linked to, the memory size of the system you're running on.
I can guarantee that that program will behave differently if you're running it under:
* Unix (executes silently)
* Windows NT (briefly pops up a window, if you run it from the GUI)
* Windows 95 (pops up a window and doesn't go away until you press cancel)
* A debugger (stepping through)
* a system with low memory (the program may dump core)
* a system with a virus protector (first the virus scanner will run, check that the program is okay, then execute the program)
*
Also, same pre-ANSI C compilers either refused to compile "int main(void)" or gave an unexplained stack alignment error because main() was assumed to always an argc and argv argument.
I could easily fill up a book, just specifying the possible real world behaviours of that program.
So if you have an engineering degree that from a program accredited by the CAEB you only have to take the Profesional Practice Exam and meet the experience requirements. If you have another undergraduate degree or other education you have to take a lot more exams as determined and set by the PEO.
Your conjecture is incorrect. Computer Science is a large branch of Mathematics--notice how in almost every university CS falls under the faculty of Mathematics. Computer Science is generally not about "creating software," but rather understanding and analyzing algorithms and examines the theories of computing. Those who have received a CS degree or a pursuing one now that there is a strong emphasis on Mathematics. The goal of which is to sharpen your problem solving skills and give you relavent techniques for creating new algorithms or analyzing old ones.
Computer Science can be an art just mathematics can be an art.
-hghSoftware increasingly is everywhere. Everything, increasingly, is programmable. Use is programming. Do we want a world where our household, let alone office, devices say politely, "Sir/Madam, I've just scanned your national ID, and you are lacking the qualification to issue that last command"?
... still, it's like requiring a certificate in "kitchen engineering" before you can cook your family dinner. And don't bring up the certificates in food preparation required of restaurant operators - most of their kitchens are filthy anyhow - it's a false security.
We've already got pragmatic boundaries in place - most VCRs, famously, will not accept programming from common users. So it is with all complex systems - most folk can't make 'em do much. Which is why anyone who can can make decent bucks from doing so. That pragmatic test is plenty - burdening the economy by disqualifying and locking out people who otherwise are capable of charming our devices into productive behavior is lunacy - except for the priesthood who would be on the inside, and hoard the power of their certifications, while leading us into the twilight of eternal Microsoft.
Yeah, too melodramatic
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I was speaking to one of the members of the CEAB who visted LU on Monday. He recieved his P. Eng designation first in Electrical Engineering then later in Software. He said that the purpose of the Software Engineer should be for critical systems, namely those that if the fail, would put people in danger. The same as Electrical, Chemical, Mechanical or Civil or other Engineering professions.
This doesn't mean that only software engineers can work on such projects. It means that before the software is used it must be approved or 'stamped' by a Software Engineer with a P. Eng designation.
This is not currently required by law in Canada (AFAIK).
Again, this doesn't mean that all programs have to be written by software engineers, or approved by engineers. It is just proposed for software that is life-endangering.
For more information:
P.S. Education alone does not an engineer make! It is the combination of education and engineering.
P.P.S It is also possible to become an Professional Engineer without attending an accredited program. Several requierments must be met but it is possible.
he is too sensible for /. :-)
well said my friend.
Having a well-established and well-respected (how is IEEE or ACM not well respected), *legally binding* set of standards will ensure that people who write sloppy and badly written software will be liable for their (in)action.
I can imagine what would happen, M$ changes some DLL in one of their "updates" and breaks my code (like they did with Wordperfect), so I get sued into oblivion. My only choice then is to go and work for a company that makes enough political contributions (AKA protection money) so that I don't have to worry about it. Looks like M$ will be one of the few companies that will be able to "innovate" under such a regime.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
will bastard routines like decimal float->binary floating point be included?
It's called the free market. Any project that desparately needs superior software will somehow find superior engineers to build said software. You don't often find a gaggle of JavaScript programmers running around building missile guidance systems, do you?
... I'd like to add a node to that: If you're serious about a project, get some bandwidth for its web page.
Professionals get degrees because humans require their services, humans that need that assurance. Companies hire software engineers, they should be able to tell in an interview whether or not they're clueful (or subscribe to the interviewer's particular coding religion, which is another matter).
And about that Software Engineering Body of Knowledge
All the IEEE seem to be doing is codifying current 'best practices' in software engineering in a similar manner to the Project Management Institutes (ANSI std) "Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge"
SE *is* project management as far as I've experienced it, or a subset. No-one with any sense would ever suggest that stds will prevent cockups in projects - but being totally ignorant of what many considers best practices will make you more likely to stuff things up.
I really can't see why developers get so upset about groups trying to put up hand-rails and guidelines for managing large projects.
If you're sitting coding up a wee access database for a mate or writing a little bash script to check your logs then you don't need them - but projects of a larger scale, involving many organisations and multiple teams DO benefit from guidelines.
Dave
I didn't know that software engineering wasn't engineering. I'm in my second year of a 4 year Software Engineering program, and as far as I know, everything about my courses makes it a real engineering degree. All my classes are through the engineerning faculty, and almost all my classes are with electrical engineering. Does this mean when I graduate my degree won't be recoginzed as formal engineering?
Ok, I think eveyone needs to go and read The Halting Problem and Worse is better
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
There's nothing wrong with taking apart your own radio, but if you charge someone to take apart their radio with the intent of fixing it you better know what you're doing. The purpose of certification is to separate people by their capabilities, the success of the certification program being that most people who are certified actually turn out to be competent as their certification claims.
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"--Shelley, "Ozymandias"
That could then mean that licenses could be required to practice software development and that this could to regulation and other legal ramifications.
No, no, no, no, NO, NO, NO!!! Keep the government AWAY from it all, for pity's sake! We don't want legislation to dictate who can and cannot write software. In my county, my wife and I are not allowed to cut each others' hair in the privacy of our own home. Because beauticians got together some time ago and petitioned the government to make it illegal to cut hair without a "license." To get a license, you have to go to a qualified beauty school and then spend so many hours cutting hair in professional, and authorized, salons.
Of course, they then artificially limit the number of beauty schools that they allow to train for such licenses. The same thing happened in the medical profession. This sort of thing is routinely done by factional groups to pressure the government to create a stranglehold on the market, reducing supply and thus letting them charge more for their services.
In the long run, it only winds up hurting us all by driving the price up while not increasing the quality of the services we receive. Do you really think that having an "official license" makes doctors better than they would be otherwise? Are "certified" Microsoft Engineers any more qualified to work with Microsoft products than the rest of us?
Bad and good beauticians and doctors can be singled out by this little phenomenon called reputation. We don't need a piece of "official" government legislation to be mandated on all who want to enter the market in some lame attempt to make things better than they would be without the artificial intervention (do a search for "Adam Smith and invisible hand").
Let anyone who wants to write software professionally, whether or not they have a degree, license, or whatever, and let the buyer beware. Let each entity build a reputation, and the market will pick the best man for the job.
An unjust law is no law at all. - St. Augustine
Engineering an art or a science?
Engineering is engineering, separate catagory, and its a good thing. But its not science or art, regardless of how those might influence it.
The greatest problem with having an accreditated program is that is requires the university to follow guidelines set by an external organization. This can be good, but when it prevents innovation and enforces scads of really stupid stuff it becomes most frustrating.
You're the ones who think that bug-free code comes from testing and debugging, rather from design.
You're the ones who say "with today's processors, I can afford to waste resources here," not realizing that inefficiency accumulates.
You're the ones who don't bother to make sure you're checking return codes properly, or checking them at all.
You're the ones who spend more time programming and less time planning a large project.
You're the ones who think there is such as thing as a "releasable hack", a "production-quality kludge."
You're the ones who think open-source is immune to all this.
You're the ones who will quickly dismiss what I'm saying, or nitpick me to death.
I don't know why I bother.
"On the surface this looks like a fairly boring document/process, but this is a major step forward - turning software engineering from an art into a science."
On the surface viewing Software Engineering as all science and no art makes for boring documents and processes. When people are bored, they naturally don't do nearly as good a job. Indeed, the best Software Engineers have the science part down cold, but also have a natural instinct that is the direct manifestation of their artistic inclination. Art and Science are the Yin and Yang of Software Engineering, and to remove or diminish the role of either is to diminish the effectiveness of the software developer(s), regardless of which one you mistakenly choose to emphasize.
If one wants to improve the overall quality of their software they must develop both their left and right brain. To shun one in favour of the other is folly. It is no different than strengthening one leg and cutting of the other in an attempt to be more mobile. Hopping around on that one remaining leg will certainly make it big and strong, but mobility will suffer almost detrimentally. I guess that makes it a major unbalanced hop toward the different, and less effective, not a major step toward anything.
Perhaps these people have never heard of the Software Engineering Institute and the Capability Maturity Model? Then again, what do I know? I'm too artistic to be any good at Software Engineering
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Sure, there is a need for software engineers that know how to build reliable software systems. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to guarantee reliability.
Oh, lots of people are very vocal about their pet methodologies or pet languages, but that's not the same as credible validation of the approaches, or a careful cost/benefit analysis.
There is a simple, free-market approach to ensuring software security: hold vendors responsible for faults. If Microsoft had to refund licensing fees when their software doesn't work, they'd be quick to improve its reliability. In areas where companies are exposed to significant liabilities, companies already are very careful with their software engineering methodologies and hire their employees accordingly.
The Software Engineering field is too immature for licensing.
I've only found *1* paper that relates the traditional "Big-company" software engineering field to the open-source movement - and it was written by someone in the open source movement, not a traditional software engineer. The software engineering community is still stuck on 25 year old processes and economic frameworks developed at IBM during the mainframe days. The last thing I want is these "Engineers" writing licensing exams when they can't even keep up with frequent radical changes in the economics and development processes of software.
When no new radical change in software development has been made for 10 years, then maybe you can license engineers - for airplane and medical equipment development...
If I buy a house that isn't structurally sound and it falls apart, I can sue the engineering firm that signed off on the work.
Forgive me if I sound incredulous, but I find it hard to believe that I'll be able to sue Microsoft if my OS crashes too frequently.
Agreed. Bereaucracy doesn't make software engineering any more "real." I don't need a license, I don't want regulation. I will do whatever I'm hired to do, hire whomever can do the job, and in general figure things out on my own, without the "help" of the government or any other regulating body.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I wouldn't be surprised if this is just another money-making scheme from IEEE.
Bullshit. You dont need to go to engineers school to learn how to design. Theres the internet, theres a ton of open source projects, and a ton of very good software engineers who you can talk to, learn from, on your own, you do not need to go to school for this, pay money to do this.
This is stupid to even think you need to do this. To build a house you need money. To write some software, or design it, you just need a good mind, and a good book along with some practice.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
This sums it up far better than I could. There's one extra proviso, too, at least here in Oz: the professional bodies (eg IEEE) can *revoke* certification of a university course if they believe it no longer provides the appropriate level of knowledge and experience. So engineering degrees in general tend to be far more useful than many computing degrees, simply because a faculty that loses certification can lose students. Computing faculties that don't need to worry can do any old thing.
And I don't think that cutting code == software design/development. After all, has anyone seen the piles of sh!te that undergrads can construct simply because they neither know nor care about inconvenient concepts like design (or testing. Or QA. Or documentation or commenting or
Aaaaaand another thing: a certification might make being a geek a bit more sexy (in social terms). It would at least set us apart from all those "I use computers too" tossers who claim equal parity because they use M$Word...
I bet MS would support formal certification of software engineers before they could produce/distribute software. All of a sudden the idea of developing for an open source community would become cost prohibitive. The result, microsoft owns *all* the code. With as big as they are, you know who would write the engineering certification exam.
Q: What is Linux and Open Source Software?
A: A set of experimental and educational code not designed or intended for real-life use.
Hmmm, seems like any sort of certification will either take too long to implement, or will be yet another massive MS joke.
The Association for Computing Machinery withdrew its support for this SWEBOK effort, after deciding that their approach to licensing practioners was inappropriate. So this probably isn't going anywhere.
In comparison with other engineering disciplines, the real problem is that we don't have a good handle on how to build software with huge safety margins so that it doesn't need to be engineered.
This seems confusing, until you look at, say, structural engineering. If you want to build something, there are standard handbooks that will tell you how to build something that's much stronger than it really needs to be, but won't fall down. That's how most houses are designed. Only when you get into more complex construction (steelwork, arches, laminated wood beams, etc.) do you need a licensed professional engineer to sign off (literally) on the blueprints.
We don't explicitly make that distinction for software. With fifty years of computing behind us, it may be time to do that.
A good place to start would be control software for anything with more than some minimal amount of energy. (For example, programming a VCR control CPU wouldn't require certification, but a garage door opener control would.) We could then go on to, say, software that handles the money of others, and perhaps to networking software that can affect more than 100 users at a time.
A formal distinction of which software matters and which doesn't is the first step. The industry needs to take that step.
To read more on Software Engineering,
you can visit Software-Engineer.org,
the community web site for Software Engineers.
Being trained as an Engineer makes you a good designer of systems, no matter what type of system you're designing.
Hooah! This is one of the funniest things I've read in a long time. I have worked with a lot of extremely talented Professional Engineers, and a lot of them I have great respect for. I have also worked for horribly incompetent PEs that have IQs teetering on 100, and have a complete lack of attention for details or what's important. This idea that Engineers are some super discipline is absolutely proposterous: They're just students who took the 5-6 year option rather than the 4 year option, sometimes because they want to parade around going "I'm an Engineer and my title is legally protected".
Software quality is dictated by the process, not by the person. Tell me that your system is a CMM5 system using the IEEE 12207 standard in a 9002 (or whichever one applies) setting, and that you have code review, proper test cases, etc., and THAT tells me whether you have quality code. Telling me that the guy who typed in the initial lines is an Engineer is an absolutely racket and is absurd.
The whole "engineer" designation is nothing more than a protection racket (I'm saying this as a member of two of the groups that have come up during this discussions): It's a way to raise the barriers to entry to say "Oh that guy who has designed 4 fantastic, robust systems in less time than we sat around and scratched our asses sure can produce, but it's not engineering production!". It's job security for those who have gotten an engineering designation. It's absolutely, positively absurd. An individuals knowledge in software development, no matter what their designation, will always be a tiny iota of the industry whole knowledge, making this field totally unlike any other that has come before.
The IEEE rocks, but they should give up on personal certifications (unless they are "no barrier to entry" certifications. I want to know what someone can do, not how much they have martyred themselves) and stick to making standards that make better software quality through better processes and systems.
And the second from the current (Nov 19) issue of The New Yorker from an article about the chief structural engineer of the World Trade Center:
But my favorite quote about engineering and science is the one that says:
...richie - It is a good day to code.
What worries me most is what you see on the front page of the site, namely the logos of a bunch of companies like Rational, Construx and SAP, who have vested interests in software engineering processes. If the committee goes away for a couple of years, comes back with a carbon copy of the Rational Unified Process and tells everyone they need to buy Rational Rose to get a certification, I'm going to be more than a little annoyed.
The basic problem is that there is simply no consensus in the industry as to what constitutes "good engineering" in software, beyond a certain very basic level. We're a very, very young discipline, and unlike structural or electronic engineering the mathematics does not exist to prove what we are doing is right.
In the absence of any real proveability in our craft, all you can do is make broad pronounciations, and then quibble about their interpretations. You can say "testing is good", but you'd never get a room full of programmers to agree whether test-first programming is better than testing completed code, and nobody's yet been able to determine which is more efficient under which circumstances. Similarly, you can say "well-designed code is good", but who's going to moderate the dispute between the CMM waterfall three month design phase group, the moderate Agile "design the module just before you code it" group, and the eXtreme "design is something you achieve as a by-product of merciless refactoring" party.
I have little faith in the mission of this group, as I can't ever see it coming up with a satisfactory document. Either the qualification for being a software engineer will be so broad as to be useless, or (more likely) it will mean that the industry will continue on as it always has, we'll just go back to being called programmers, and spend our time scoffing at certified "software engineers" as followers of an arcane, broken methodology.
Charles Miller
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
...Am I the only one who doesn't get this?
Yeah -- it certainly looks that way.
However, what if there's a non-commercial certification process. Run, not by RedHat or Microsoft, but by a vendor-independent group of engineers. You prove to them that you are a capable engineer/programmer/whatever. They give you a certificate that actually means something. Perhaps require the certification to be re-written every N years.
There already is such a certification process in place, it's the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (www.ncees.org). They're the ones that administer the Fundamentals of Engineering (a.k.a. Engineer-in-Training) and the Professional Engineer examinations. This is the biggie all civil, mechanical, electrical, etc. engineers have to take every 5 years to keep their licenses current. The FE and PE exams are written by engineers for engineers. Engineer licenses aren't granted by NCEES, but the exams administered by NCEES are accepted by most licensing boards much in the same way the SAT or ACT is standardized and accepted by most universities.
The way NCEES exams work is the test is given in two 4 hour sessions, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The first part is 120 questions in multiple choice format that are inclusive for all engineering disciplines. There is an equal mix of basic chemical engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering and a bunch of math and physics related questions. The afternoon half is 60 questions and is discipline specific, e.g. EEs take the EE specific exam where the test goes into much more depth. There are some computer programming questions in the electrical engineering portion of the test, but they're generalized and non-platform specific; e.g. pseudo code implementations of simple things, such as sorts and machine language loops.
If software engineering is considered "real" engineering, NCEES will probably pick up the testing end of the certification process, but then software engineers will have to do what all other engineers do and take engineering courses outside their major, just like MEs, ChEs, EEs, etc. do. Then they too can sit through the same dreadful 8 hour long motherfscker of a test all the other engineers take.
A better solution would be a NCEES style exam where the first half tests knowledge of things that should be common to all software engineering, such as familiarity with Windows, unix-like OSes and Mac platforms, networking, programming fundamentals, language syntax, basic algorithms, etc.; and the second half would be more specific such as embedded systems programming, network engineer, graphical user interfaces, or whatever. The exam would of course have to be written by software engineers for software engineers.
I have never before written a lame "mod this up" message but this message is one of the most truthful, profound posts I've read on Slashdot in a long, long time.
The philosophy behind governing and certifications boards is a noble and reasonable approach presuming it was done right, but exactly as this message and the followup mentioned: How many times do you hear about an engineer being discredited, or a lawyer losing their license to practice law? How about doctors losing their license to practice medicine? The reality is that it is almost never (and only in the case of extreme negligence that is publicly known. For all of the talk of Engineers losing their certification I would love to see the numbers who actually have). These organizations exist to protect their members, not this absurdly ridiculous "protect the public" bullshit that hopeful PEOs are spouting on here.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Direct accountability has been proposed in the past, probably many times. It is an extraordinarily bad idea that lets a corporation completely off the liability hook and puts it as a personal liability on the PE that stamped the design. Think about it. You are a PE, management says "stamp this or go the fuck home". Now you have a dilemma: stamp something unsafe as safe, or lose your job. If it fails, you lose your job anyway, and may lose your licensing, house, car, etc (personal liability remember). Corporations exist as limited liability partnerships for a reason. Holding salaried employees personally responsible is a colosally bad idea. Even from the consumer side, would you rather sue a corporation, or some poor schmuck that had a bad once?
None of you are real engineers, ha, loser, pay me money and I'll certify you! This is a scam, a very self serving scam, fight the theft of your freedoms.
lol... anyone can MAINTAIN a system that is in place, for example your broken radio.
Engineer means a person with inginuity. They think up new concepts and figure them out.
Do you call your mechanic and engineer?
Chris Ness
Software Engineering II
McMaster University, Canada.
I dont want software engineering to become some esoteric type of thing like quantum physics, or math, I want it to be something everyone can take part in.
Too late, software IS math. When you write software, you're solving math problems. If you do software research, you're doing math research. It's a newer branch of math, but it will become just as esoteric with time.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
require licenses for software users.
That could then mean that licenses could be required to practice software development
Sigh. No.
It would mean you couldn't go calling yourself a Software Engineer if you're NOT, but nobody is going to card you trying to buy a copy of VC++.
There is no area of engineering or science small enough to be a science. All require large sets of knowledge and experience. All have many dimensions in practice, and approximating an optimal design is equivalent to the search for large state spaces, i.e. NP-complete.
However much science may be involved, the practice of computer science is selecting and applying heuristics. A fine definition of art, I think.
Lew Glendenning
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Several years ago, many states attempted to enforce the laws on their books to require anyone acting as a professional engineer to be licensed as such by the state. As anyone who has ever achieved a Professional Engineering (PE) license can attest, there is no comparison between a PE and a MCSE. Comparing the exams would be like comparing middle school to college. The PE exams in most states are brutal. As far as I know, Texas is the last state to enforce the law as it applies to software. Many of the companies in "Silicon Valley" threatened to relocate of California enforced the law there. So, California (like many other states) changed the law to apply to structural and electrical engineering disciplines.
(quote) So because I have no university degree I'm suddenly considered useless? I studyed long and hard to change careers from banking (end quote).
S.E. is NOT about writing code. It is about making software "change-friendly" or "maintenance-friendly". Writing code is easy in comparison. Future-proofing is tough.
(begin rant)
I just hope that more scrutiny is given to BS and cliche-driven hot-air methodologies like OOP.
oop.ismad.com
Table-ized A.I.
By requiring a Professional Engineering (PE)license, the PE assumes liability for their work. Let us assume that a SW engineer wrote an application for the Fire Department to help them route their trucks to the emergency quickly. The program failed to understand the direction of one-way streets thus causing the fire truck to go the wrong way down a one-way street and causing a fatal accident. The SW engineer who put his engineering seal on the program would be liable for the death and $$ millions in damages. Fortunately PE's are usually bonded for several million dollars to protect them. A seat-of-the-pants, self-taught, hacker-tweaker, may not be insurable regardless of how good he is. The insurance companies who write the liability bonds will simply not take the risk on someone without a PE license. Without the PE license, the family of the deceased is simply told that, "Well, it was just a bug in some software. No big deal to fix." No big deal; someone was killed because of it.!!!! You could easily imagine a similar situation with a pharmacy dispensing medicine in error and causing death. I hope this sheds some light on the subject. For the record, I am generally against the PE license because the exams are much too rigorous and generally irrelavent to real world application of the discipline. For instance, an electrical engineer working in a electric generating station for the power company does not need to know how to design a VHF antenna. sys-eng
As someone who has a degree in chemical engineering (and 7 years experience in the field) and who has worked in the software field even longer, the notion that programming is engineering doesn't quite feel right. It's an issue that has been around for a while and seems to resurface periodically. To be honest, it's just a name and in the grand scheme of things I don't really care if someone chooses to call themselves an engineer.
However, the problem that a lot of "traditional" engineers have is that all engineering fields share a common set of courses. These core classes include more than mathematics and they are generally not part of the Computer Science curriculum.
Computer Science is no less challenging a field than engineering, but just as chemistry and physics majors are not engineers, neither are computer scientists.
And what about the software that causes the death and harm?? The hardware can generally do no harm without faulty software. What about faulty SW that allows a defective part to pass inspection and then fails -- causing death or harm? sys-eng
Wouldn't you like to have the software your city uses in its 911 service certified by a professional certified by a board? How about the software that building engineers use? Surgical tools?
I'm not saying that a license should be required for programming that kind of software. Instead, I think it should be a requirement that such critical software be at least validated by a professional before being put to use.
No data, no cry
It is an exact science in that one can sit down and work out exactly what a computer is going to do. It is an experimental science in that most of the time it is easier to just run the program, see what comes out, and then figure out what happened.
A software engineer will differ from a programmer in her/his diligence with:
documentation: They will have specs and design documents in place before any coding is done.
testing: They will test every function. Testing will tend to be coordinated, disciplined rather than haphazard. They will test functions after they make any changes.
planning: A software engineer will map out data structures. They will work out a software design before they code anything.
resource use: A software engineer will be able to tell in advance what the resource requirements of the code will be. (IE, each record is going to take n bytes, the algorithm will run in n*log(n) time.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
If you can't do Fourier transforms, solve partial differential equations, or drink a 6-pack in 2 minutes you are not an electrical engineer.
In Canada we wear iron rings to inflict even more professional certification envy on computer "scientists".
I didn't think it all took much ingenuity to drive a train. I think it mostly involves pushing a lever forwards and backwards, but I could be mistaken...
The ACM arguably represents software professionals more than the IEEE. They were a part of this effort until it became too fanatical about certification, so it's not like it's a NIH situation.
I would have added the link myself, but Mr. McBreen got to it first.
I'm going to try and reply to a series of threads here in one go.. so please I apologize for length.
Actually a quick correction, there are currently three acredited programs in Ontario for software engineering. These are offered at McMaster University, Western and Ottawa.
Waterloo started its program this year, and will be up for acredition (from my understandign of the CEAB (Canadian Engineering Accredition Board) the year of the gradutation class.
So what makes software engineer? At McMaster where I attend, it is the idea of taking common engineering practises and incorperating it into computer science.
Each school offers a different flavor due to the strength of their Engineering Faculty and Computer Science faculty. I currently attend the McMaster program and I'm sorry if this seems one sided.
Our prgoram works due to karge part of Dr. Parnas, who has envisioned this feild for sometime. Another strong point of our program appears to be that a large portion of our professors have industry experince(Nuclear Plant Shutdown systems, the design of IMPS).
One person mentioend that we should be sure to be using open source software in these programs. So far in my education, we've using nothing but opensource, and (suprise, surprise) slashdot is the default load page for our redhat lab. (I don't think our unix lab has a default load page currently).
The biggest problem here at McMaster currently is the education of industry. IBM, SUN and NORTEL I believe understand the difference between a SFWR Enigneer and a CS grad.
As the world shifts mroe and more to software, it's becoming that computer programing is more then an art. It's an art that needs to be drawn with the responsibility of a professional engieer.
I'm studying software engineering right now in Quebec and when my group finishes, if I dont fail too many courses, I should be among the first software engineers in Quebec. I think Ontario and other other provine are 1 or 2 years ahead. That menas that by 2002 there should be Software Engineers(tm) in Canada.. Btw, at least in my province, you cannot state that you are an eng. if you are not official eng. so MCSE's have to have a different name and everything. They are definetely not engineers.
;)
But right now, the only privilige that software engineers will have here is to be able to sign with a eng. at the end of their name.. Our names
Good luck to my American coleagues!
Tester
Student in Software Engineering at Polytechnical School of Montreal
Each of your points about the practice of developing Software based systems ... although stated in an extremely negative way ... are certainly not 'Off Topic'.
/.
... which includes the social and environmental setting of systems and how those things evolve and are managed. The code that makes them go is a small subset of that much larger picture.
Every one of the points you make is true of far too many inexperienced developers. But IMO it stems from inexperience, not laziness.
Sofware developers too often display the attitudes and practices you list. The SEBOK is an effort to formalize the experience gained over the last 45 years in such a way that newer practicioners won't need 45 more years to find out on their own. And the SEBOK appears to me to be much more complete than the SEI's 'Capability Maturity Model' approach to organizing and formalizing this huge topic area.
A formal and comprehensive statement about what knowledge and skills are needed will allow Academic Institutions to devise cirricula that will impart the necessary information to newcomers. The Academy can do this in far less time and in a far less haphazard way than decades of plugging away to gain experience. That would go a long way toward breaking the bad (naive?)habits you list.
The IEEE does seem to indicate that an individual cannot be a professional unless licensed. Since 'licensing' carries with it the idea of being able to deny or allow practicing the (science? art?) of systems development, there have been many objections to this initiative here on
But I think many of these objections are mis-placed because the SEBOK addresses Software Engineering
Those who write Applications or Drivers or Database Systems use bits-and-pieces of software engineering but are not Software Engineers, even if popular jargon and Microsoft does try to say that they are, and (I hope)would not be threatened were "Software Engineering" to become a 'licensed' profession.
What is more important, though, is the potential for the SEBOK to greatly reduce the far too widespread 'rookie' attitudes about and approaches to development that you decry.
But why does establishing a software engineering certification improve accountability? If Microsoft hired certified software engineers, why would they be any more accountable?
The suggestion that anything a licensed software engineer writes should expose him to liability strikes me as very dangerous. Code is much more complex than bridges, and assigning responsbility for problems is hard. If I become liable for any stupid thing some random person on the Internet does with my code, I simply won't publish code for free. That can't be the goal.
So, again, companies that make safety-critical equipment and sell it for such purposes should be liable. Companies that sell word processors should be required to allow product returns if it doesn't work. Then, market forces will get companies to hire the programmers they need to get the job done.
Oh, my gosh! You got the solution! The silver bullet! Tens of thousands of computer scientists and engineers have worked on this for decades and not come up with a solution. But you found the answer. Brilliant.
Come on, get a clue. Modular and top-down programming were found wanting 20 years ago. They are important principles, but they are not a solution.
A non-trivial piece of software isn't any more complex than a bridge.
A non-trivial piece of software has tens of thousands of different kinds of "parts" (classes, functions, expressions) and often millions of "parts instances". And, unlike physical parts, which are designed, manufactured, and tested by dozens of people each, software parts need to be designed at a rate of several per day by one programmer. Software works amazingly well for the conditions under which it needs to be created.
I don't know how much physics you've taken but the math behind a bridge is complex and it's really easy to make a mistake.
The mathematics behind bridges is absolutely trivial compared to the mathematics behind the semantics of computer programs.
As an Engineer you're held liable if something you design breaks. So you'd better make damn sure you get it 100% correct.
If you pay me to accept the liability, I'll be happy to. The simple fact is: most users don't care, and most users apparently aren't willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a word processor that doesn't crash.
Yet, I am a computer scientist and proud to be one. Software engineering is part of any CS curriculum. Often people are confused by the term "Computer Scientist" because they do not know the background. Mostly they think I ask me if I'm some kind of engineer. I tell them I am not, and that I'm "just" a computer scientist. Well, most of the time they look as if I said "mad scientist", but that is another story.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I think the major differences in software created by an engineer and non-engineer are in maintainability, readability and flexibility. The first thing to do is write specifications on what will be done, next how to do it and finally the program itself. When the personnel change and someone new comes in he or she can immediately continue where the previous person left off. Unqualified person just writes a bit of code and leaves: imagine the trouble figuring out what heck was that obfuscated module intended to do and why it doesn't do it..
I think it's unlikely that a set of 'best practices' could encompass some of the contradictory approaches to systems analysis and design, without resorting to lowest-common-denominator definitions such as 'planning is good, design is good, testing is good'.
For example, I am probably not alone among UK coders to have been taught that SSADM was a good method for analysing a large software project. XP basically refutes the idea that structured methodologies are good for any project that has rapidly changing requirements.
Slightly offtopic ...
Computational Science: The science of modelling/simulation of scienctific problems, also known as applied mathematics.
Scientific Computing: The science of programming techniques.
Am I right or wrong?
Eih bennek, eih blavek
No, it's an attempt to make it non-esoteric. Scientific fields can be esoteric, concerned with things that don't affect normal ppl. But engineering is never esoteric! Engineering is concerned with taking all the rules the scientists and mathematicians have come up with, and using them as tools (or simplifying them where required) to solve a real world problem, like building a bridge, or making a chemical compound - or writing the software which controls the engine in your car.
What's esoteric is art, and treating software as a pure artform rather than bringing in any scientific basis for it is a dead-end. In the past, scientific theories were judged not on whether they worked but whether they "looked" good or neat or felt "right" to ppl. This is the way software is today. What's needed is the software equivalent of Faraday, Darwin, etc - currently software is still at the alchemy stage where you can impress someone with something that looks flashy but is actually not doing anything at all.
We absolutely don't need more programmers. What we need are more good designers. And the idea is to establish that good software design can be taught.
Grab.
Do *not* let this happen.
The IEEE are looking to control who is allowed to develop software for money and who isn't.
Like the ICAEW for accountants and the Law Society for solicitors (this is UK-centric btw)
When a body like this gets to say who can join and who can't you get a closed shop. This is not good for anyone.
You also get professional qualifications, having to pay huge fees to keep your membership up to date, and just basically becoming their bitch.
This will take all the fun out of software and will attract tedious anal-retentive suits instead of the free-thinking individuals in scruffy clothes (OK I generalise but you get the idea) that we need in this profession.
Fight the power!
Woobie
Yeah, I'll love it when Software Engineering is considered a "real Engineering discipline". Just like how much I want to to program to ISO 9000 compliance so I can be a "professional". Screw it, call me a duck and let me do my work.
Anyway, storing programming patterns are fine, but a repository of them is going to help me very little in my job. Hell, I haven't even gotten around to reading Design Patternsby Erich Gamma et al. Programming is art as much as it is engineering; it is akin to being both the architect and the engineer.
The specification and design of software, and in this I also refer to detailed refinement of the design until you arrive at an executable product is an art, not a science. If it were a science for which we can define a satisfactory set of rules to ensure a quality product emerges, then I'd write a program to write programs and we'd all become redundant. Reductio ad absurdium!
As the design aspect of software - every time a choice has to be made to move from one high level idea to a concrete implementation - then this requires a subjective decision. If we want to improve software quality, then we need to take an entirely different approach. We still need the coding artists, in order to come up with ideas, and we need the specification artists to capture ill-defined scenarios to the best of their ability. The interesting stage comes thereafter... once we've arrived at a specification and implementation. The specification can be assessed depending upon whether a system meeting this specification performs well once deployed. The software can be assessed upon several criteria - significantly including:
1) Satisfaction of the specification that came before (should be 100%)
2) Resources consumed to realise each interaction (the less the better) - Code side; memory use; disk reads; wall clock time required; interactive response etc.
3) Availability of formal proofs that a specification is satisfied.
4) Burden of assumptions made about any underlying technology, and failure model assumed to cope with unexpected events and failures.
What we need is a robust way to specify requirements; and indisputable ways to show when an implementation doesn't meet a specification - and a strategy by which alternate implementations of small components can be compared in the context of the project specification.
While I appreciate the need to identify competent engineers, most programming projects fail due to poor management, not bad engineering.
If you really want to improve software, focus on better management, not on better engineers. With better management, you will eventually have better engineers without worrying about certification.
Perhaps the IEEE should focus on a certification process for managing projects.
And so it goes.
You make my point for me, I think. As you say, a language is just one tool, and there is much more to software engineering than just that. So, if we can't even sort out a meaningful accreditation system for that one language, how can we possibly consider trying to do it for software engineering as a whole, and put any faith in the result?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"After the Gold Rush : Creating a True Profession of Software Engineering" is a book by Steve McConnell (Author of "Code Complete", "Rapid Development" and "Software Project Survival Guide"). The book deals with this subject in a clear and logical way. Highly recommended.
Not really. (You can go and look at the threads concerned using Google Groups if you want to see the real attitudes exhibited.) The problem is that certification programs produced thus far have been laughable. Take Brainbench, for example. I went along and got a top-in-my-country score in C++ the first time I tried. OK, I'm a better than average C++ programmer, but there were people on the standards committee who define the language further down than me. That might be because at least four or five of the questions they asked had no correct answer available, and that was a multiple choice test! If testing specialists can't get that right, what hope do they have of meaningfully assessing any testee-produced code?
It's not just Brainbench, though. Take a look at an average Software Engineering course at universities these days. American ones seem to be particularly bad right now, with many uni's following fashionable languages and techniques regardless of any technical merit. My own university, a well-regarded one in the UK, still seems to think that software engineering should be based on the waterfall model, if you listened ot their lecturer. (It wasn't quite that bad -- alternatives were at least discussed -- but you get the point.)
By the way, as for just taking true/false or multi-guess questions based on the contents of The C++ Programming Language, you won't get much meaningful information out of that. Like many old exams, all it tests if memory ability, with no real gauge of understanding. A few simple questions at the start of an interview might set the broad level of discussion for the remainder, but nobody smart recruits based on them alone, and it's notoriously difficult to set useful questions even then.
I don't see any real progress being made in the area of software engineering accreditation until there is an independent body, run by software engineers for software engineers, wherein the body of experience and expertise is sufficient to give any assessments they make some reasonable credibility. Right now, most software engineers don't even belong to any sort of union, and only a few belong to any other professional body, in my experience. Compare that with most other engineering disciplines, and you see both how far we have to go, and perhaps the direction for the first few steps.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Tom DeMarco (co-author of Peopleware), wrote an article addressing the issue of certification. Here's a snippet:
The case for certification made by Ralston, Mead and also by Patricia Douglas goes something like this: Poor old Citicorp and poor old Aetna and poor old Microsoft really can't tell if the people they are thinking of hiring are good, competent, educated programmers or lazy, uneducated, even unscrupulous types, so what should we do? How about we appoint an august elite (made up of our own august selves plus some of our august pals) to judge. We will divide the world into betas, who will be allowed to work in the field and gammas, who will not. In the process we will be demonstrating that we ourselves are alphas. What a brave new world!
The whole article is here.
Having an MCSE, is indeed a method to become hired into corporate wherever, the other way is to know someone, at least in the USA.
Anyway, I sometimes get to work with some of those MCSE-to-get-a-corporate-job people and to be honest, they are practically useless. The simple technical knowledge they lack is absolutely scary. I correct them, answer the same questions all the time. It is frightening to know that they are the people that are running the corporate network.
So, I am working on getting my MCSE in order to "join" their ranks and fix all the crap that they are doing. It shouldn't take but a few months of self study. If they can pass the tests with their level of knowledge, I should have no problem at all.
So, to recap, getting an MCSE is indeed a way for some people to get in the corporate hiring door. It sucks, but that is how it happens.
Of course, I am just a help desk guy that got in through family connections. I am also a computer hobbiest, which probably helped a bit.
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Since you are unable to build properly structured sentences and also spell....
Not eveyone needs a license. Only those persons that are knee deep in areas that directly affect public safety would require certification. And only those people who want to go the extra step and take on the extra responsibility would pursue the license. Every other professional field has tiers of responsibility: why is software special?
However, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to make all software developers require that type of certification and title. For instance, a failure in the code of a game is never a life-threatening issue (unless someone has a bizarre example...) and most desktop applications also would not cause death if they fail (again, so me a bizarre example.)
So, it seems to me that developing a true Software Engineer title would do nothing more than possibly benefit mankind. As long as they don't attempt to force this upon all software developers.
If it does become something that all software developers will need, I can see the development of new games and other applications stagnate as the development houses could be forced to charge a larger sum for their software. While this could potentially defray the cost of the new licenses that their developers would need. It just wouldn't make any sense for non-life-critical software to require that Certified Software Engineers be involved in the making of the product.
While this could potentially increase the quality of games and other non-mission critical software, is that really necessary?
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If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
I once came across a date validation routine that did something like 31.14-18.82 as part of the calculation. I could not figure it out. (The code was not commented at all.) Eventually I went to the basic prompt and typed in "print 31.14-18.82". Instead of getting 12.32, I got 12.319999 and suddenly I realized what the code was doing. I felt like throttling someone.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
A software engineer will differ from a programmer in her/his diligence with:
* documentation: They will have specs and design documents in place before any coding is done.
* testing: They will test every function. Testing will tend to be coordinated, disciplined rather than haphazard. They will test functions after they make any changes.
* planning: A software engineer will map out data structures. They will work out a software design before they code anything.
* resource use: A software engineer will be able to tell in advance what the resource requirements of the code will be. (IE, each record is going to take n bytes, the algorithm will run in n*log(n) time.
In my job I have:
planned projects
teste code
documented stuff
0 in that resource use thing :)
Still I have no college degree. :) wich sounds cool.
Got to get one, one of these days, then I'll be able to do the resource thing
professionalism is very important; standardized practices are nice. They are not the same.
As I see it, standard engineering disciplines (mechanical, civil, etc) deal with open standards type of stuff - I can buy a book detailing all the shear and stress factors of given alloys of metal, the load that a pylon of material X can support, etc.
If as a civil engineer I engineer a bridge and it collapses, it's possible for a third party to forensically determine either the beam was improperly constructed, improperly riveted in place, or it was a case of me not carrying the double integral of 2 pi cos 3 delta theta in my design calculations, and as a result the beam was carrying lambda delta 3 cos pi two g Bilbo's constant, an insane amount of stress for that loadbearing item to carry.
If I develop for Microsoft (in doing so, my body of knowledge pertains MOSTLY to that platform, as opposed to portable things like physical constants, etc) software, I have NO IDEA what I'm grafting my code onto. Not even a third party is allowed to wade through MS's code and mine and determine what went wrong. I can't legally reverse engineer the DLL to see what the hell is going on.
Whereas a civil engineer's license is likely to hold cause neither PI nor the load-bearing properties of concrete nor the inherent properties of steel are likely to change any time soon, we're looking in the computer field anyway at things being in a state of constant change.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Software Engineering study is designed to produce Software Engineers. In case people have missed something, Software Engineering is already an Engineering Discipline. It's separate and distinct from Computer Science.
Actually I'm planning on going into it in second year at McMaster University in Ontario.
--
Todd's Law: All things being equal, you lose!
Apparently everyone forgot the phrase "The devil is in the details."
Verifying the math on the design of a bridge may be routine, but the construction process is less than trivial. Beams must be certified. The concrete must be certified. The welding must be certified. The engineering component is simply not relegated to "making the math work". Mess up at any point and there is the potential for major liability.
The Master Plan Always Fails
Does everyone who wants to take the exam need a degree, or just whoever first created the exam?
Anyone with a degree from an accredited college already passed a bunch of tests covering all that material. Wouldn't this exam only be useful to qualify candidates who (for whatever reason) don't have degrees? Or is this a "have they forgotten everything" requalification everyone must pass periodically?
As I recall, to be a "developer" in .NET it is around $10,000 per year, and $1000 for a "junior developer".
Do these two developments coming out within two months of each other make anyone else nervous?
Writing correct software isn't impossible, just more difficult. For now the payoff is so small that hardly anyone bothers.
Software is math, so it follows that it is like math. It is also quite a lot like quantum physics, especially when dealing with multiprocessing.
What it isn't like, though, is building a bridge or a car, except perhaps for the architecture and design aspects, but those aren't called "engineering." There is no place you can look up a bunch of rules that, when applied relatively mindlessly, result in good code. Sure, you can find algorithms in books, but the killer is always the overall system, and every one of those is different.
But what's so horrible about MS isn't that the government lets them get away with it. The horrible thing is that their users let them get away with it. MS uses its dirty dealings to defy the most basic economic principles.
I guess the point I'm trying to push across is that "Paul" (I am referring to someone specific of a different name when I say this, btw) is as qualified, experienced and trained as any programmer I know, if not moreso. I would entrust his programming skills/knowledge/experience as much as any "certified" person.
I think I more object to the idea that unschooled -> untrained... because with the computer profession it is quite possible and plausible to achieve the same level of education through various means other than conventional schooling. While yes, it would be a good idea to have some type of standardized measurement of a programmer's knowledge and capabilities, I don't think that schooling should be it.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Well look at the WordPerfect case, who had to change their software WordPerfect or M$? I rest my case. Expect to be having to rewrite software when your 70 that you wrote 30 years ago because of this, you are now an endentured slave. The only way I can see round this is to use a throw away corporation for each job you do and make it take all liabilities with it when you shut it down, prefereably offshore in a country which has good secrecy laws so they can never find you.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Having read numerous comments on the topic of software becoming a distinct and regulated engineering profession, a rather anti-SE trend is evident. It seems as though the majority of the people are against such industry regulation. Why? My impression is that many are not engineers but would like the 'right' to label themselves as such -- this is evidenced by the recent dispute between MCSE holders and regulatory chapters. Are these comments the product of a general fear of being 'left behind' as the software industry matures into an engineering discipline?
It has been said that one can "judge a tree by its fruit". The Pentagon says the one can judge the probability of whether a software program will function error-free by the Program's developers, their company, and their accreditation by the Carnegie-Mellon Software Engineering Institute. Ut's a CYA thing, mostly.
It is my perception that the CS community has never forgiven Mr. Berners-Lee for letting the non-initiated in the door. As a Project Manager for a large military/civilian software system in the mid-90's, I remember one contractor berating another because the winning contractor had done their work in VB. The loser had done his work in Fortran. Probably still is.
The approach the IEEE is taking will only solve half the problem. What good is a team of "certified" engineers if the management is still PHBs? Where I work the management gets to make all of the *final* decisions about design, implementation, and deployment. I can count way too many times where buggy code has been released to the customer just because the management didn't want to take the schedule impact to fix things. And then of course there are the *closed* management only meetings where they decide on things like system architecture. Well before I start ranting let me get back to my point: What good is a team of "certified" software engineers when the management who control things are not required to be certified themselves? Perhaps have some form of technical management certification (and I don't mean TQM).
Corel (or whoever they bought WordPerfect from) suffered precisely because Microsoft had no liability for problems caused by changes they made, so they could break their customers' third-party apps with impunity. If Windows had a warranty with teeth, they couldn't have gotten away with doing it.
More interesting is that an electrical engineer probably would not be allowed to fiddle with the wiring in a house unless he had done the required "dues" (apprentiships etc) for a sparkies ticket. Not sure what my point is, but it's interesting.
And any move to 'licence' programmers naturally should be vigorously and angrilly oposed (read stallmans "right to read";- think illegal debugger)
"The creation of genuinly new software has far more in common with developing a new theory of physics than it does with producing cars or watches on an assembly line" - Bollinger
s t. pdf
http://www.idiom.com/~zilla/Work/Softestim/kcse
With great power comes great electricity bills.
A small elite minority tries to define a "Body of Knowledge" consistent with their beliefs and slow down progress by carving it in stone and steel, and even seeking political help to limit access to the field for people who refuse to swallow their bullshit. I admit there is some useful stuff in it, and it all sounds very reasonable, but honestly: How many professionals with a master and 4 years of experience in the field (the target audience) are able to professionally apply a substantial portions of this "body" under the correct circumstances ? My guess is less than three out of hundred, and even they will ignore the majority of it because it is useless.
4 .txt) revealed a perfect example for this: A train derailed because of a bearing overheating that was indicated by an alarm 29 hours before the accident, but the alarm was disconnected because the crew was unable to find the alarm cause and assumed a defect in the monitoring system.
This self appointed elite was not able to set up a website that survives the slashdot effect, and if you ever worked with some of e.g. Rational products and assume that they used their own teaching and tools in constructing this crap, it becomes obvious that no amount of impressive sounding formal engineering methods and a big names lineup alone can produce a good piece of software.
What these methods are good for is to save your ass when the lawyers come, and to prove that you exactly built the shit the customer has ordered, and that it is not your fault that the system is too slow and too hard to use and that the operators should have sticked exactly to the procedures described on page 972 of the operations manual to avoid [two days downtime, loss of 6 months of transaction history, hitting the mountain, reversing the thrust in midair, melting the reactor core]
The attitude that comes out of this document drives me mad, and it has the potential to do so much harm to the evolution of the field that Microsoft seems to be a pleasure compared to these guys. They even try to borrow ethics and principles from medicine, a field where mystification and deception are a guiding principle since 2000 years, and to get a medical education in the roman empire you literally had to become a doctor's slave, being freed not before you were going to replace him.
When I was young I was a firm believer of almost everything my teachers and professors taught me; you may call me a naïve coward, but I was taught many times that it is a bad idea to question their doctrines for several reasons:
1) They are often correct
2) It is difficult to find out when they are wrong
3) If you find out they almost never admit they are wrong
4) They prefer to defend themselves by ridiculing, threatening and insulting
5) They have a lot of power by controlling your career path
There are exceptions, but you need a lot of luck or persistence to encounter one of them; I rarely did, so in a mixture of good faith and cognitive dissonance I spent a lot of time and effort on learning their doctrines.
But soon it became increasingly difficult to bridge the gap between many of those things I learned in academia and the first hand experience I gathered in various positions in the industry, ranging from designing hardware and kernel for embedded factory automation systems in the mid 80's to distributed virtual environments today.
During my professional career I encountered a number of programming languages, operating system, implemented ITU-, IEEE-, DIN-, ISO-, IETF, OMG and W3C standards, and went through some meters of scientific papers, produced at least a half million lines of code myself and guided the production of about five times as much.
And the more I learned from experience, the more livid I became at those teachers. What a waste of time it was, and what a large pile of bullshit I had been forced to swallow, and it took some time to get rid of all those misconceptions that were stuffed in my mind.
Don't take me wrong; I still believe that the scientific way of finding some truth is superior to almost everything else, but a large amount caution is required when dealing with scientific results, and much more caution when dealing with people who are paid for practicing and teaching science.
I am convinced that:
1) most scientific publications are obsolete (about 98% is my guess)
2) there is a tremendous abuse of scientific rituals in areas where science is hardly applicable (e.g. psychology, social sciences, medicine, business, software, history, politics, city planning, art)
3) you can find a bunch of scientist to support almost anything if you throw enough money in
4) real progress in science is rare, comes by surprise and often ruins the life of the contributors
5) most scientist are impostors
Now, coming to the engineers, who are supposed to apply science to build something useful, I am think that:
1) Engineers either think that they are the better scientists or do not know anything about science
2) most engineers are cowards
Now, when it comes to computers and process of creating software, I surmise that after gathering 25 years of experience, learning from failures and steadily improving my skills I feel qualified to raise my voice on this issue.
A simplified, unbalanced summary of my convictions regarding software is:
1) Heavyweight formal methods are a useless waste of time if want to successfully create software that satisfies you and your customer, except in extremely rare cases
2) There is no substitute for own experience, even if you can gain a lot from the experience of others
3) There is no substitute for thorough testing
4) It is helpful to have a solid mathematical knowledge, but you must not confuse math with software
5) Standardization is a necessary evil, and I commiserate those brave souls involved
6) Most standards are flawed because they are too complex to be fully understood even by their creators, not to mention mere mortals
7) Every implementation of a standard I have ever seen was flawed
8) The future belongs to light-weight, easy-to-understand iterative methods
Regarding all those cited mission-critical systems in avionics and telecommunication, most of them are of so incredible bad quality that it is a miracle that mankind survived so far; but even if the system works as designed, people often get killed because the interface between the human operator and the system does not work as expected; just browse through an arbitrarily chosen risks digest, and the first one I just picked (http://www.infowar.com/iwftp/risks/Risks-19/19_9
NASA and all other space agencies loose rockets and satellites all the time, several passenger planes were lost because of interface problems, and if you have ever watched an air traffic controller in front of his computerized radar system you will be surprised about the amount of wrong information on his screen which he has to filter out mentally.
Now these areas are where formal methods were applied for many years now, but the effort is extraordinary and the results are not convincing.
I don't need to mention the poor quality of today's popular operating systems (Linux is not better here than Windows). The most popular compilers of one of the most popular programming languages (C++) are so full of bugs that their usefulness is severely affected, but if you try to use development software that is less popular you feel like moving through a mine field: every new move you make might blow it up. It seems to be a general rule that software tends to be as poor as tolerated, no matter how bright the developers are, and only widespread use of the software improves quality.
And those products from the formal methodologist camp are not a nibble better, on the contrary: Rational Rose, for example: After so many years they still can't properly display text, zooming in the diagram views is the worst I have ever seen in any app, and it crashes more often than anything from Microsoft. (And that Rose doesn't understand C++ is no miracle; no program does)
Formal Methods are like communism: In theory, they sound good. In practice, they do not take into account the diversity of human desires and thinking, and the gap between the software engineering community and the people developing software is widening.
I would appreciate this SWEBOK if these guys were not so serious about making life harder for many people and trying to force their "body" down of throat of thousands of students.
They are marginally improving quality in some areas while hampering possible significant progress that comes from widespread use of light weight methods like Extreme Programming, which is the greatest advance in Software Engineering I have seen in my career so far.
p.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
Do you program for a living? How could you say something so absurd? When was the last time an algorithmic error made your program crash?? Its all about where the rubber hits the road. Memory management. Device support. Library integration. How the %$#@ will the lambda calculus, Z logic, or VDM proofs help you?
Stop waiting for the math because the math that tells you to use a debugger and a profiler is called experience.
But I can also agree, some software tends to have "quantum effects"... (I'm going to read the PDF when at home, you know firewalls 'n stuff)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I'm sure some types of employers for specific types of work would like to insist on educational, certification and experience requirements.
But I don't see how the US market can tolerate the bottleneck things like this will create. There is already a shortage of skilled computer people (technicians, engineers, tech writers, sales, marketing, administrators, managers, etc...). The industry cannot wait for people to obtain all the knowledge and skills that certification may require.
So I think ultimately the market will determine where the value is.
What is interesting is, here we have a community of people that probably studies and continually develops new skills as much or more than any industry, and people are looking to solve quality problems via certification, in a market thats moves very fast with a shortage of skilled people...