Encyclopedia of Software Engineering – Licensing and Certification of Software Engineering Personnel

Certification and licensing have often been viewed as hallmarks of a true professional discipline. Most fields that are generally recognized as “professions” have one or the other and often both of these mechanisms in place. As software engineering struggles to establish itself as a discipline and, at least in some quarters, as a professional discipline the appropriateness of and mechanisms for certification and licensing have become the subject of widespread discussion and debate. This article reviews the role of licensing and certification and addresses their applicability to software engineering. It also presents a possible model of how licensing and certification might look in relation to Accreditation, Education programs, curricula, bodies of knowledge, taxonomies, and other artifacts of a discipline.

If certification or licensing is appropriate for software engineers, certain facts need to be established: (1) that software engineering is a separate discipline, (2) that software engineering is a profession, (3) that software engineering is sufficiently established to justify certification or licensing, and (4) that certification or licensing of software engineers would be beneficial enough to justify the effort to establish them. We examine these in turn.

Keywords:

software engineering discipline;
profession;
certification;
licensing;
registration;
model;
physicians;
software engineers

INTERNAL QUALITY SYSTEM PERFORMANCE: CASE STUDY AT THREE INDONESIAN NURSING SCHOOLS

This paper describes internal quality system petformance at three Indonesian nursing schools and examines the match of the existing Accreditation programmes with the developing internal quality system. A cross sectional study is used with self-administered questionnaires and applied to selected nursing schools. The questionnaire was designed according tocategories of framework of total quality management model. Interview and discussion with respondents including snowball sampling to other teachers and staffs were petformed to clarify and validate data and to enriched the information The activities measured were the enabling and the results factors. The enablers were including Leaderships, strategy, resources, human resources, Educational management, teaching teaming process, research and development and also evaluation mechanism, while the results were covering students and personnel satisfaction and partnership. Results shows that some enabling factors were not included in the Accreditation, while several indicators in the sub component of Accreditation did not explicitly reflect internal quality system petformance. The school stratum as the outcome result of a quality measure is analogue to customer satisfaction, which would depend on direct influence of internal factors such as quality of schools leadership, strategy and Educational management. Since the total Accreditation score affects school strata and public recognition, it is necessary to use more objectives and relevant indicators by incorporating the internal and external factors as a measure of school quality petformances. Key words: Accreditation, Education, quality system evaluation, nursing

Developing online Accreditation Education resources for health care services: An Australian Case Study.

In 2013, ‘National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards’ Accreditation became mandatory for most health care services in Australia. Developing and maintaining Accreditation Education is challenging for health care services, particularly those in regional and rural settings. With Accreditation imminent, there was a need to support health care services through the process.
A needs analysis identified limited availability of open access online resources for national Accreditation Education.
A standardized set of online Accreditation Education resources was the agreed solution to assist regional and rural health care services meet compulsory requirements.
Education resources were developed over 3 months with project planning, implementation and assessment based on a program logic model.
Resource evaluation was undertaken after the first 3 months of resource availability to establish initial usage and stakeholder perceptions. From 1 January 2015 to 31 March 2015, resource usage was 20 272, comprising 12 989 downloads, 3594 course completions and 3689 page views. Focus groups were conducted at two rural and one metropolitan hospital (n = 16), with rural hospitals reporting more benefits. Main user-based recommendations for future resource development were automatic access to customizable versions, ensuring suitability to intended audience, consistency between resource content and assessment tasks and availability of short and long length versions to meet differing users’ needs.
Further Accreditation Education resource development should continue to be collaborative, consider longer development timeframes and user-based recommendations.
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