Hi,
It seems to me that this is something we should be concerned about. (I
have got a hint from a student yesterday, and found the links via
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ )
From http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/kaner/archives/000056.html :
"The IEEE Computer Society has been developing its own statement of the
Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). They are now calling
for a review of SWEBOK, which you can participate in at
http://www.swebok.org .
[...]
"The SWEBOK is written as the basis for licensing exams for professional
software engineers. If your state requires you to get a license to
practice software engineering (and more will, if they are convinced that
they can create fair exams based on a consensus document from the
profession), the SWEBOK is the document you will have to study.
"If the SWEBOK is the basis for the licensing exam, the practices in the
SWEBOK will be treated as the basis for malpractice lawsuits. People who
do what is called good practice in SWEBOK will be able to defend their
practices in court if they are ever sued for malpractice. People who
adopt what might be much better practices, but practices that conflict
with the SWEBOK, will risk harsh criticism in court. As the basis for a
licensing exam, SWEBOK becomes as close to an Official Statement of the
approved practices of the field as a licensed profession is going to get.
[...]
"I am most familiar with SWEBOK�s treatments of software testing,
software quality and metrics. It endorses practices that I consider
wastefully bureaucratic, document-intensive, tedious, and in commercial
software development, not likely to succeed. These are the practices
that some software process enthusiasts have tried and tried and tried
and tried and tried to ram down the throats of the software development
community, with less success than they would like.
And from http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/kaner/archives/000095.html :
"SWEBOK was created using a strange process. They started with the table
of contents of the main software engineering textbooks -- as if there is
a strong relationship between software engineering as described in
textbooks and software engineering as practiced in the field. From
there, SWEBOK developed as delta's from these books. SWEBOK is focused
on "established traditional practices recommended by many organizations"
and is intended to exclude "practices used only for certain types of
software" and to exclude "innovative practices tested and used by some
organizations and concepts still being developed and testing in research
organizations."
[...]
Pascal
--
Pascal Costanza University of Bonn
···············@web.de Institute of Computer Science III
http://www.pascalcostanza.de R�merstr. 164, D-53117 Bonn (Germany)