> More importantly, it is almost impossible for engineers to be as well incentivized to spend extra time exploring edge cases in something they already believe to work than to ship a feature on time.
Personal liability and professional insurance works for all the actual “professions” in the US, to some extent, right?
It might be time to start the considerations for professional licensing for platform scale or commercially published software.
Real engineering disciplines also have dedicated QA and test engineers.
More like certified products. New ISO standard may require professional liability for software products, which will be adopted as requirement by big consumers and will pull the industry into certification loop, because insurers will ask for it. This will obviously put a high entry barrier to many product categories, slowing down innovation.
Yes, but slowing down to avoid hazards is sometimes important.
Medical devices and such are the only places I’d expect to see the need for certified products. By extension, in the new era, we really ought only expect certified software where we expect a duty to care from the software system (or any other assigned duty)
In development of medical devices existing quality controls are already working well, right?
My point exactly, embedded devices are the closest software gets to actually being built by licensed engineers. The expectation can often be that you are an electrical engineer by training, where licensure is a viable path, unlike in software engineering.