Resumen
This article presents information about licensing for software engineers in Canada. The author says, software engineering requires individual professionalism. Engineering in Canada has for years been a self-governing profession, given exclusive right to practice engineering under provincial and territorial Engineering Acts. Software engineering in Canada has for years been a central area of computer science. It has not been a professional engineering discipline. Recently software engineering has been declared as an area of professional engineering by the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers. The central issue is in fact whether software engineering should be an institutionalized profession. The license is merely a manifestation of such institutionalization, essentially a device used by an institutionalized profession to distinguish insiders from outsiders. According to the author, the institutionalized profession model leads to many problems and does little to guarantee the most characteristics desired in a good software engineer. He suggests the individual professional model where an individual's professional competence for carrying out a particular software engineering task would be judged on a broad range of characteristics as they apply specifically to that task, such as his or her, quality of education, skills mastered, employment history, personal characteristics.