[gdp]

You appear to have inferred incorrectly that I am talking about safety critical work.

I am not. I'm talking about anything that people are expected to spend money on. The certification passes to the software, and then users are capable of making slightly more informed decisions.

I'm a formal methods geek, so I generally advocate theorem provers for stuff which is actually safety critical. To me, certification of developers would just be a way of lifting the general quality of the non-safety-critical stuff that still has the opportunity to cost people lots of time and money.

Think about viruses, for example. People complain about viruses causing millions of dollars of damage.

The virus didn't actually do any damage. The shonky programming that allowed the virus to propagate in the first place did.

And that's why certification is important. Hopefully it would at least ensure that people writing software are familiar with the issues that can affect software quality.