Mandatory Professional License for Software Designers

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Mandatory Professional License for Software Designers

Abstract: Given the wide impact and real-time safety concerns of some software applications, it seems reasonable to regulate who will be doing the writing of this critical software. A number of other professions dealing with human safety require their practitioners to be either licensed. At present software professionals are not licensed. However, because software does have far-reaching and potentially disastrous effects, all software designers should also be professionally licensed in some manner.

Would you think twice about flying on a commercial airliner if you knew that anyone straight off the street could apply to pilot the jet you sit on? Would you be worried about going to a doctor who never attended medical school, even though he assures you that he "knows what he's doing"? And think about how you feel while driving next to a tractor-trailer barreling down the highway. Would you be more nervous if you knew that absolutely no training was required to jump behind the wheel of that big-rig?

Now consider how you feel about the fact that the man who wrote the routines to allow you to draw $60 out of your ATM might be some uneducated hacker. The lady who wrote part of the auto-pilot routine for the 747 you fly on might have cheated her way through all of her computer science classes and landed her job without any professional certification. And the software that is supposed to save your new novel to disk could have been written by any nut who happens to know a little C++.

Besides altruistic concerns about public welfare in safety-critical jobs and applications, the threat of lawsuits and an interest in protecting the field's own reputation drives many professions to institute licensing and training programs. The fact is that the airlines do regulate who can fly commercial airplanes. Doctors do have to go to medical school, and even large-truck drivers have certification programs to pass. However, no liscencing is currently required for software developers-even those programming safety-critical applications. Because software has such far-reaching effects and the very real potential to harm when written poorly, software professionals should be licensed as well. This license should ensure that the computing professional has the required body of knowledge and proper ethics to perform his job well.

Part of the issue is that software is somewhat invisible and creeps up in all sorts of places-often as an aid to those in strictly-licensed professions.

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