The Responsible Software Engineer

You might expect that a person invited to contribute a foreword to a book on the 1 subject of professionalism would himself be a professional of exemplary standing. I am gladdened by that thought, but also disquieted. The disquieting part of it is that if I am a professional, I must be a professional something, but what? As someone who has tried his best for the last thirty years to avoid doing anything twice, I lack one of the most important characteristics of a professional, the dedicated and persistent pursuit of a single direction. For the purposes of this foreword, it would be handy if I could think of myself as a professional abstractor. That would allow me to offer up a few useful abstractions about professionalism, patterns that might illuminate the essays that follow. I shall try to do this by proposing three successively more complex models of professionalism, ending up with one that is discomfortingly soft, but still, the best approximation I can make of what the word means to me. The first of these models I shall designate Model Zero. I intend a pejorative sense to this name, since the attitude represented by Model Zero is retrograde and offensive ... but nonetheless common. In this model, the word "professionalism" is a simple surrogate for compliant uniformity.

1 Introduction.- Professional Bodies.- 2 Software Engineering: A New Professionalism.- 3 Attributes and Goals for a Mature Profession.- 4 Establishing Standards of Professional Practice.- 5 Professional Activities of the British Computer Society.- 6 Software Engineering Education, Personal Development and Hong Kong.- 7 The Road to Professionalism in Medical Informatics.- 8 Who should License Software Engineers?.- Accountability.- 9 Is an Ethical Code Feasible?.- 10 Can a Software Engineer Afford to be Ethical?.- 11 Software Project Management Ethics.- 12 Obligations for IT Ethics Education.- 13 Legal Aspects of Safety Critical Systems.- 14 Do Software Engineers Help or Hinder the Protection of Data?.- 15 Is it Reasonable to Apply the Term Responsible to Non-Human Entities?.- Equal Opportunities.- 16 Technology and Citizenship for the Disabled, and Why it Matters to You.- 17 Problem-Solving Tools for the Disabled.- 18 Who Holds the Key to the Glass Door?.- 19 The Contribution Women Could Make to IT Professionalism.- 20 But isn't Computing Boring?.- Working Practices.- 21 Professional Responsibilities and Information Systems Failure.- 22 Problems in Requirements Communication.- 23 Responsibilities under the Capability Maturity Model.- 24 Revenge of the Methodology Anarchist.- 25 Software Engineering Practices in the UK.- 26 Escaping the Mythology that Plagues Software Technology.- 27 Is the Rush to Quality a Move to Inequality?.- 28 Pressures to Behave Unprofessionally.- Education and Training.- 29 Selling, Marketing and Procuring Software.- 30 Curriculum Support for Professionalism.- 31 Academic Perspectives of Professionalism.- 32 Student Projects and Professionalism.- 33 Converting Computer Science Graduates into Professionals.- 34 Stereotypes, Young People and Computing.