Apparently not too many people cared for my "Software Engineering is Broken" blog entry (maybe because I called everybody incompetent), but I don't think I'm totally off. "Binging" around, I discovered the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) looked into treating software engineering as a licensed engineering profession during the late 1990s, but concluded the field was too immature and that licensing would not give the same level of assurance as it did in other engineering fields. ACM did qualify their position with the "at this time" clause, so hopefully they will address this issue again.
And I think they will, because it's not just me, some random guy with a blog, who thinks software engineering is broken. Tony Hoare, legendary computer scientist who developed Quicksort, also thinks software engineering is broken. He didn't exactly say it was broken and I don't want to put words into his mouth, but in a recent presentation on the "Science of Computing and the Engineering of Software" he dreams that one day,
- software will be the most reliable component of every product which contains it
- software engineering will be the most dependable of all engineering professions
I read that as: software engineering is broken, hopefully we can fix it one day. Think about it for a second. Today, when I buy an iPhone and it doesn't work my first inclination is crappy software, not defective hardware or manufacturing. This both annoys and embarasses me as a person and software engineer professional. When there's a problem with the iPhone I want consumers to think, "must be the bad manufacturing process Apple's Chinese partners are using"--not "buggy software."
I have 42 years on Hoare, so lets hope I get to see his dreams come true.
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