The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

The full 1993 report linked in the article has an intetesting statement regarding software developer certfication in the "Lessons learned" chapter:

> Taking a couple of programming courses or programming a home computer does not qualify anyone to produce safety-critical software. Although certification of software engineers is not yet required, more events like those associated with the Therac-25 will make such certification inevitable. There is activity in Britain to specify required courses for those working on critical software. Any engineer is not automatically qualified to be a software engineer — an extensive program of study and experience is required. Safety-critical software engineering requires training and experience in addition to that required for noncritical software.

After 32 years, this didn't go the way the report's authors expected, right?

To add. Safety-critical software is not something you pick up in a classroom, it is something built over years of disciplined practice. There are standards like DO-178 for avionics and IEC 61508 for industrial systems, but how rigorously they are applied often depends on cost and project constraints. That said, when failures happen, the audit trail will not matter to the people harmed. The history of safety engineering shows that almost every rule exists because someone was hurt first.

I am a licensed professional software engineer in Canada. It's been fifteen years since I first registered with my professional association, but I will probably not be renewing my license this year as it's not providing any real benefit to my career.

Two decades ago there was a lot of talk about turning software development into a structured engineering discipline, but that plan seems to have largely been abandoned.

I've had some discussions with my engineering regulator in Canada. It's clear they have no idea what software engineering even is or who should be regulated or why. I tried to get them to provide some examples of what would and would not count as software engineering, but they couldn't.