Certification in engineering, at least, means that you have had schooling, shown competiency in the field, and have proven your knowledge and skills on a battery of written tests. For most projects which call for the construction of buildings, infrastructure, process plants, etc, the ground cannot be broken until every part of the construction, from groundwork, environmental impact, and the like, has been signed off by a respective certified engineer (that is, your civil eng. would sign off on the infrastructure and land usage, your mech eng. on the structural stability, etc.) This is to ensure that any construction that has potental public impact (which typically is ANY large-scale construction) has been 'approved' at some point by people competitent in the field. If that structure should fail in a way that should have been predictable, then those that signed off on it are responsible.

However, not *every* construction project has to be approved or signed off by a Professional Engineer. For example, if you wanted to add on to your house, you typically need to get some license for construction and approval by a local government before you start, but they typcially don't care about the full extent of construction, only the general type of work that you're doing.

Applying the analogy to computer programming, there ought to be a PE classification for programmers, certainly, but I would not necessarily see it as mandatory for all programmers. A duty of a so-called CompEng PE would be to make sure that code that is bound for release into a sector that may affect the well-being of the public is as bug-proof as possible. And note that this would not be for all code: we're talking ares such as medical devices, traffic control systems (ground or air), and similar fields that if the code fails, lives could be in danger; if some code happened to lose your tax payment for the year, for example, that's not life threatening, and thus not critical for a PE review, but certainly couldn't hurt. The need for such a PE review for code would require frequent code reviews, as well as processes in place for companies to earmark code as 'passed', such that when ready to ship, the PE only needs to sign off on it. But you'd only need to have one or two PEs around for a small company, as adding that PE to your name CAN increase your base pay as well.

But there are people that program not for companies but on their own; if we forced any code that was released into the world to have been PE-approved, the small-time, shareware/OSS programmer may become a dying breed. Instead, we want the situation where you can modify your house without PE intervention; you want to be able to write your own code without having to answer to someone else. So requiring certification for all code is a bad idea.

While I do support the concept of a PE for comp eng, I think that the attitudes of many businesses in the tech field is a long way off from it. As you point out, the rapid-release cycle of late, which is a major cause for many bugs, would be too much for a CE PE to be able to keep up with. Again, we have Netscape to blame for this, as they were probably the first group to widely distribution true 'beta' versions of their software to the public en masse, and thus being the development cycle of releasing many weak versions often instead of one strong version once with patches between versions. Certification of developers would not help with that.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
"I can see my house from here!"
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important