Licensing and Certification of Software Engineering Personnel

Abstract Certification and licensing have often been viewed as hallmarks of a true professional discipline. Most fields that are generally recognized as “professions” have one or the other and often both of these mechanisms in place. As software engineering struggles to establish itself as a discipline and, at least in some quarters, as aprofessionaldiscipline the appropriateness of and mechanisms for certification and licensing have become the subject of widespread discussion and debate. This article reviews the role of licensing and certification and addresses their applicability to software engineering. It also presents a possible model of how licensing and certification might look in relation to accreditation, education programs, curricula, bodies of knowledge, taxonomies, and other artifacts of a discipline. If certification or licensing is appropriate for software engineers, certain facts need to be established: (1) that software engineering is a separate discipline, (2) that software engineering is a profession, (3) that software engineering is sufficiently established to justify certification or licensing, and (4) that certification or licensing of software engineers would be beneficial enough to justify the effort to establish them. We examine these in turn.