A Review of the Professionalization of the Software Industry: Has it Made Software Engineering a Real Profession?

• Main Author: MOK, Heng Ngee
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2010
• Subjects: Software engineering profession; software professional; professionalism; professionalization of the software industry; licensing of software engineers; Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1373; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2368/viewcontent/161_5.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Every industry strives to be called a "profession", and software engineering is no exception. This paper attempts to define "profession" from three different perspectives and provides a chronological narration of the professionalization efforts of major IT bodies such as the IEEE Computer Society, Association of Computing Machinery and British Computer Society to promote software engineering from "occupation" to "profession". The outcome of this professionalization process is then examined against the three vastly different definitions of "profession" to qualitatively gauge the success of the professionalization process.