The Responsible Software Engineer

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-5

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 7-16

3. Professional Bodies

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 17-19

      PDF

   2. Software Engineering: A New Professionalism

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 21-31

   3. Attributes and Goals for a Mature Profession

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 32-39

   4. Establishing Standards of Professional Practice

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 40-42

   5. Professional Activities of the British Computer Society

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 43-47

   6. Software Engineering Education, Personal Development and Hong Kong

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 48-59

   7. The Road to Professionalism in Medical Informatics

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 60-71

   8. Who should License Software Engineers?

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 72-77

4. Accountability

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 79-81

      PDF

   2. Is an Ethical Code Feasible?

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 83-91

   3. Can a Software Engineer Afford to be Ethical?

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 92-99

   4. Software Project Management Ethics

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 100-106

   5. Obligations for IT Ethics Education

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 107-112

   6. Legal Aspects of Safety Critical Systems

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 113-123

   7. Do Software Engineers Help or Hinder the Protection of Data?

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 124-128

   8. Is it Reasonable to Apply the Term Responsible to Non-Human Entities?

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 129-140

5. Equal Opportunities

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 141-142

      PDF

   2. Technology and Citizenship for the Disabled, and Why it Matters to You

      • Colin Myers, Tracy Hall, Dave Pitt

      Pages 143-147

You might expect that a person invited to contribute a foreword to a book on the 1 subject of professionalism would himself be a professional of exemplary standing. I am gladdened by that thought, but also disquieted. The disquieting part of it is that if I am a professional, I must be a professional something, but what? As someone who has tried his best for the last thirty years to avoid doing anything twice, I lack one of the most important characteristics of a professional, the dedicated and persistent pursuit of a single direction. For the purposes of this foreword, it would be handy if I could think of myself as a professional abstractor. That would allow me to offer up a few useful abstractions about professionalism, patterns that might illuminate the essays that follow. I shall try to do this by proposing three successively more complex models of professionalism, ending up with one that is discomfortingly soft, but still, the best approximation I can make of what the word means to me. The first of these models I shall designate Model Zero. I intend a pejorative sense to this name, since the attitude represented by Model Zero is retrograde and offensive ... but nonetheless common. In this model, the word "professionalism" is a simple surrogate for compliant uniformity.

• Capability Maturity Model
• computer science
• development
• information system
• project management
• software
• software engineering
• software project management
• standards

• School of Computer Science and Information Systems Engineering, University of Westminster, London, UK

  Colin Myers, Tracy Hall

• Worldwide Information Systems, NCR, London, UK

  Dave Pitt

Policies and ethics