[pnathan]

H'm.

Kinda surprised that you've not heard it before, it's knocked around the professional programming circles for a while now. Anyway.

You're quite right that it's not a trivial problem. IEEE promulgated the SWEBOK, which the ACM publically refused to support (I read through the SWEBOK, it's, imo, generally irrelevant).

It's also not a question of creativity and problem solving, it's a question of quality assurance - i.e., the downside of being in such a group would be the culpability for being sued for malpractice. :-)

[RosieA]

I guess I heard talk about SWEBOK, but honestly didn't have it in a context that lead me to compare it to guilds and unions like that.

I DO like the idea of "coding malpractice" law suits though. ;-P