I attended a software engineering conference last week. Richard Mark Soley CEO of OMG was the keynote and gave an interesting presentation on MDA. Without going into the drawn out detail there was a panel discussion on the future of software engineering. One of the topics was licensing of software engineers by state governments. It seems there exists a group of people who believe governmental intervention will improve the quality of software.

What one thing is better after governmental intervention? In my opinion, legislation rarely results in an increase in quality. The environment and public education seem to be glaring examples were legislation has not resulted improved quality.

If software companies were held accountable for bugs, then we might see an improvement in software quality. There is a fine line to between holding companies accountable and hindering the industry. I am not sure that our fine government could find that fine line and not cross it. I guess that’s why state governments would rather put in place laws that could create classes of software professionals. As soon as you begin to require software engineers to take specific course work through universities we tie the opportunities in software engineering to socioeconomic institutions.

The workers control the means of production!