[jbondeson]

There are tons of industries that should require it. The issue is that we focus in on the software that can directly kill us, rather than all the software that can indirectly do it. We instantly reason that all software we use to control things like cars or airplanes should be highly controlled, but what about financial software, phone systems, medical records software?

One of the sloppiest and haphazard programmers I ever worked with is now writing software for non-critical medical monitoring devices (external monitors like O2 sensors, and blood pressure monitors) and it scares the living daylights out of me. When I'm in a hospital room I look around to see if his company's hardware is in use. It might not kill me, but it could contribute to that end.

I'll come full circle around to my initial assertion that I don't know if we can even get to the point of a true Professional Software Engineer. Many of the tasks we deal with are highly abstract. How do we define an acceptable failure rate for a TCP stack? And even if we do, how do we take that into account for a monitoring application? There are many hard questions we have to tackle prior to our industry being taken seriously as a true engineering discipline.

What troubles me is that very few of the leaders in the software community even care about these questions.