Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]

There appears to be a lot of hate towards this in the comments (because it's not perfect?), but I feel strongly that we need explicit bodies of knowledge, along with certifications for having been trained on it.

Every company I go to, the base of knowledge of all the engineers is a complete crapshoot. Most of them lack fundamental knowledge about software engineering. And they all lack fundamental knowledge about the processes used to do the work.

That's not how engineering should work. If I hire an architect, I shouldn't have to quiz them to find out if they understand Young's Modulus, much less teach them about it on the job. But that's completely normal in software engineering today, because nobody is expected to have already learned a universal body of knowledge.

I get this thing isn't perfect. But not being perfect isn't a rational argument for not having one at all. And we certainly need to hold people accountable to have learned it before we give them a job. We need a body of knowledge, it needs to be up to date and relevant, and we need to prove people have actually read it and understood it. If this isn't it, fine, but we still need one.

(this is, by the way, kind of the whole fucking point of a trade school and professional licensing... why the fuck we don't have one for software engineers/IT, boggles my fucking mind, if this is supposed to be the future of work)

> Every company I go to, the base of knowledge of all the engineers is a complete crapshoot

Sounds like unfortunate companies to go to.

> much less teach them about it on the job

That is literally how and where people learn the job pretty much everywhere.

> it needs to be up to date

Yeah, it will never be.

> we need to prove people have actually read it and understood it

Why/how?

>> it needs to be up to date

> Yeah, it will never be.

And this particular document will never be up to date. SWEBOK gets updated on the order of every 5-10 years, so it's always going to be dated. This is one reason it's a poor document for its purpose. If they want it to be relevant it needs to be continuously developed and updated. Hire active editors for the different "knowledge areas" (consider even losing that notion, it's very CMMI which is not something to aspire to) and solicit contributions from practitioners to continuously add to, remove from, correct, and amend the different sections. Build out the document they actually want instead of wasting 5-10 years publishing an updated, but still out-of-date, document.

I think you missed the purpose of the SWEBOK. It is intended to cover basic fundamentals which don't change much decade by decade. Not the latest JavaScript framework or whatever. Just about everything in the previous version from 2014 is still relevant today.

That made me curious, is there a changelog somewhere on changes between editions?