Abstract
The issues associated with the accreditation, certification, and licensure of software engineers are, or at least should be, of great concern to the software engineering community. Perhaps as a result of publicity about safety-critical software disasters in the news media, some state legislatures have considered regulating the practice of software engineering, and some professionals believe that accreditation, certification, and licensure are inevitable. Yet there is no agreed-upon body of knowledge for software engineering on which to base accreditation, certification, or licensure, which makes implementing them difficult at best. In addition, it is not clear that these processes and possible mechanisms to support them are well understood within the software engineering community. This paper surveys how these three processes are conducted in other professions, summarizes the processes as they currently exist for computing in general, identifies some issues that are involved in implementing the processes for software engineering, and suggests possible actions that can be taken by the software engineering profession. The implications of accreditation, certification, and licensure for education are also discussed.
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Mead, N.R., Turner, A.J. Current accreditation, certification, and licensure activities related to software engineering. Annals of Software Engineering 6, 167–180 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018973818744
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018973818744