I'm am engineer by many definitions, although I don't have or wear a stripey hat, so not the most important definition.
I'm not licensed though and have no signoff rights or responsibilities. If I were to consider signing off on my work or the work of my colleagues after review, the industry would have to be completely different.
I have been in the industry for more than 20 years and I can count the number of times I've had a complete specification for a project I worked on with zero hands. I can't sign off that the work is to spec it the spec is incomplete or nonexistant.
Writing, consuming, and verifying specs costs time and money and adds another layer of people into the process. The cost of failure and the cost to remediate failures discovered after release for most software is too low to justify the cost of rigor.
There's exceptions: software in systems involved with life safety, avionics, and the like obviously have a high cost for failure, and you can't take a crashed plane, turn it off and on and then transport the passengers.
You don't get a civil engineer to sign off on a one-story house in most cases either.
Any software system that might produce legal evidence should also be an exception… it feels a bit too much of a common case to call it an exception though.
(This is in reference to the Horizon scandal, yes.)
I'm not licensed though and have no signoff rights or responsibilities. If I were to consider signing off on my work or the work of my colleagues after review, the industry would have to be completely different.
I have been in the industry for more than 20 years and I can count the number of times I've had a complete specification for a project I worked on with zero hands. I can't sign off that the work is to spec it the spec is incomplete or nonexistant.
Writing, consuming, and verifying specs costs time and money and adds another layer of people into the process. The cost of failure and the cost to remediate failures discovered after release for most software is too low to justify the cost of rigor.
There's exceptions: software in systems involved with life safety, avionics, and the like obviously have a high cost for failure, and you can't take a crashed plane, turn it off and on and then transport the passengers.
You don't get a civil engineer to sign off on a one-story house in most cases either.