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Professional Engineering Licensure

In this section we discuss the narrow issue of licensure in the Canadian context. Later on we will discuss software engineering as a profession. We designed Waterloo's Software Engineering program to be accreditable by both the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board as well as the Computer Science Accreditation Council. We have abandoned CS accreditation, as it requires significant effort and there is no demand for it.

Engineering accreditation is a more fraught exercise; Memorial University of Newfoundland was involved in a lawsuit in the 1990s about its use of the name "software engineering" for a non-accredited program and agreed to drop the name. Being an accredited engineering program also imposes significant curriculum constraints, in particular with respect to requirements for licensure of faculty and minimum required amounts of natural science content.

In Canada, graduates from a CEAB-accredited engineering program may be licensed as engineers (PEng) after they (1) have accumulated 4 years of Canadian professional experience while supervised by a PEng and (2) pass an examination on engineering law and ethics. Engineering regulatory bodies take the position that only licensed engineers should have job titles including the word "engineer", though enforcement in the software domain is patchy.

In practice, we have observed that very few of our graduates pursue licensure; Professional Engineers Ontario reported in May 2017 that only 7 Waterloo BSE graduates had been licensed. Our exit survey of 2018 graduates reported that 16% of respondents intended to pursue licensure. This is difficult in practice; the same survey showed that only 33% of our graduates intended to work in Canada, and many will not be supervised by PEngs.

We broaden our focus slightly to our neighbour, the United States. In that country, close to zero software engineers sought licensure as such; the software PE exam was taken by 81 candidates between 2013 and 2018, when it was discontinued. The American context is different, most importantly in that "engineer" is not a protected title.

On the other hand, Canadian engineering graduates are eligible to receive an iron ring, presented to them at the \emph{Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer}. In our experience, many of our graduates demonstrate that they identify with the engineering profession by wearing the ring.

Recent developments

The most recent public discussion of engineering licensure in Canada occured in the province of Quebec. Different provinces have different regulatory regimes. In 2019, the Quebec government proposed amendments to its \emph{Code des Professions} which would have included information technology to the regulated areas of practice for engineers. The \emph{Coalition pour l'avenir de l'informatique} (Coalition for the future of Computer Science), which included industrial and academic computer science representatives, campaigned for information technology to be excluded. The final version of the law, passed in November 2020, indeed contained a specific exclusion for computer science (specifically \emph{informatique} in the French).

Should software engineering be licensed? From a more personal context, none of the authors of this work (all with academic teaching and research roles) practices engineering based on the Ontario definition of practice\footnote{Technically, in some other Canadian jurisdictions (e.g. British Columbia), the teaching of engineering counts as the practice of engineering.}, and none of us has stamped a plan.

Licensing of software engineers was a huge topic of debate in the late 1990s. Professional engineering organizations (particularly Texas) were clamouring for software developers to be licensed. The software engineering community was waiting for some catastrophic software error to push the governments to require at least the licensing of software engineers who develop safety critical systems.

Yet, when software errors cause planes to fall out of the sky, there isn't a peep.

It seems safe to conclude that, on a global scale, licensing of software engineers is dead.

Bill Wilson on accreditation

Also, I have a comment on the issue of accreditation. From the very beginning the goal was to design and create a program that would fully integrate the Computer Engineering discipline and Computer Science discipline. To best achieve this goal the program was developed to be a “Truly Joint” program between the Department (School) of Computer Science in the Faculty of Math and the Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering. The program was jointly developed, implemented and operated by both academic units and the students belonged to both domains. The goal was that graduates from the program would be fully qualified as Computer Scientist AND as Computer Engineers. For this reason full accreditation was sought and successfully obtained in Computer Science and in Engineering. So seeking accreditation in both disciplines was not the direct goal for the program but is a consequence of the original goal of the program.

Other Motivations for Engineering

  • family with engineering (Bill Bishop?)

  • cultures that value engineering

  • perception of being an "elite" program, due to smaller enrollment

  • reiterate about iron ring