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Software Engineers in Canada are already able to become licensed Professional Engineers after graduating from an accredited Software Engineering program, writin

by peeters 13y ago

Software Engineers in Canada are already able to become licensed Professional Engineers after graduating from an accredited Software Engineering program, writing the ethics exam, and gaining the prerequisite experience working under another engineer. However, because there is no current requirement for any software to be certified by an engineer, most graduates don't care much to get it, and won't end up working directly under a P. Eng. anyway. So in my experience it hasn't really taken off as a licensed discipline. I have an Iron Ring, but that's as far as my P. Eng. path has progressed.

cbhl 13y ago
> because there is no current requirement for any software to be certified by an engineer Certifying software is difficult, even under the best of circumstances. Edit: Er, I didn't substantiate the first sentence. So here's an example. Apparently the reason that most medical devices run on Windows NT (as opposed to, say, Linux) is that Windows NT is already certified for that use, so it becomes easier to certify your custom MRI scanner because you can just include the pre-certified Windows NT part and only have to get the new code your company wrote certified. Similarly, seL4 is the only OS I can think of that has been formally verified (i.e. proven correct mathematically); I'm quite certain none of {Windows, Darwin, Linux} has been formally proven to be correct. When I attended a recent talk at my local university, I found out that the shutdown routines for a local nuclear power plant were running on 40-year-old mainframes because those mainframes were certified to survive earthquakes and things. Work was in progress to find new hardware and rewrite those routines, although the Engineer I spoke to was under the impression that none of the hardware made in the last decade was certified to operating under the same level of confidence.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Indeed, a lot of verification logic techniques were developed for nuclear shutdown code. By David Parnas, no less.

by peeters 13y ago

cbhl 13y ago

> because there is no current requirement for any software to be certified by an engineer Certifying software is difficult, even under the best of circumstances. Edit: Er, I didn't substantiate the first sentence. So here's an example. Apparently the reason that most medical devices run on Windows NT (as opposed to, say, Linux) is that Windows NT is already certified for that use, so it becomes easier to certify your custom MRI scanner because you can just include the pre-certified Windows NT part and only have to get the new code your company wrote certified. Similarly, seL4 is the only OS I can think of that has been formally verified (i.e. proven correct mathematically); I'm quite certain none of {Windows, Darwin, Linux} has been formally proven to be correct. When I attended a recent talk at my local university, I found out that the shutdown routines for a local nuclear power plant were running on 40-year-old mainframes because those mainframes were certified to survive earthquakes and things. Work was in progress to find new hardware and rewrite those routines, although the Engineer I spoke to was under the impression that none of the hardware made in the last decade was certified to operating under the same level of confidence.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Indeed, a lot of verification logic techniques were developed for nuclear shutdown code. By David Parnas, no less.