Yet another uncomfortable truth
Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that software development is the only branch of engineering that doesn't have established standards and methods that are proven to yield trustworthy results. It took a couple of hundred years for such standards and methods to be worked out in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, and it may just be that software development hasn't been around for long enough yet. But the big difference is the extent of deployment of the technologies while they are still immature. Software now permeates almost everything, but we aren't yet able to assure its adequacy. That's the real problem we face, and it can only be solved by establishing standards and mandating their application.
In no other branch of engineering can a totally self-trained practitioner be taken on trust and tasked with delivering mission critical (or indeed life critical) systems. It's about time we stopped this practice in software development for those domains. So we need enforced standards that deliver safe systems, as we have for even for technicianship disciplines such as electrical installation and gas fitting. Nobody would argue for mandatory certification of games developers, but I would most certainly insist on it for those developing things that can affect livelihoods and lives, and such certification should ensure understanding of first principles, not just knowledge of the knobs and levers of proprietary tools. What we have had to date instead is a worrying trend of successive generations of tools that make it easier to deliver results without paying attention to the essential first principles - a deskilling that perpetuates the very problem we should be trying to solve.
.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
