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If you follow the professional liability model used in other fields of engineering (civil, etc), the buck stops at whoever sealed the report / letter of assuran
by ggcdn 7y ago
If you follow the professional liability model used in other fields of engineering (civil, etc), the buck stops at whoever sealed the report / letter of assurance / drawings / etc). We usually call them the Engineer of Record (EOR) in my field, and they are usually someone at the top.
I'm not advocating for that model in software, but it does provide a very transparent way of determining who is responsible. As the EOR, you may not design every member or do every calculation, but ultimately it's your ass on the line. I suspect it also changes your behavior when you know you are the one taking responsibility.
- KineticLensman 7y agoThe industry I used to work in used an Independent Assurance Reviewer (IAR) role. The IAR signed off a go-no-go review, whose primary content was identification of the risks that the business would incur if it proceeded past a specific review gate. If an IAR failed a review, the business could still proceed, but the responsibility for subsequent failure then explicitly lay with the leadership rather than the engineers / reviewers. This would be rare though, in most cases IAR failures would lead to mitigation of the identified risks. In an ideal case, the IAR was identified at the outset of a piece of work and was then involved throughout the project life cycle (waterfall or agile). Review points included bid release and contract acceptance as well as design and test readiness reviews.