Earning the Badge

A key step in any mature licensing plan is a competency exam administered by each jurisdiction, and the form of software's professional engineer exam has not yet been determined. In other branches of engineering, professional engineers generally take an eight-hour exam that includes solving eight problems four are answered in essay format and four require about ten multiple-choice answers each. The specifics vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Exams by themselves aren't foolproof, and passing the software professional engineer exam by itself will not be sufficient to obtain a license. A professional engineering license traditionally requires both work experience and a degree from an accredited engineering school. In software engineering, the degree is problematic because, although about a dozen universities now offer undergraduate programs in software engineering, none have yet been accredited in the United States, though three programs have been accredited in Canada.^[20] Accreditation of the first program in the United States is expected in 2003 shortly after publication of this book. We can expect a non-degree bootstrap-licensing phase to last 10 to 15 years until the university infrastructure is in place to graduate sufficient numbers of software engineers.