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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.

This article describes the teaching of testing in an undergraduate software specialization in a computer engineering curriculum and in a graduate course of Verification and Validation (V&V) in Canada. The specific example of the undergraduate program is taught at the Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada since 1992. In the RMC program, software engineering is spread over eight key courses. These are the: Computer Program Design; Software Work Products and Maintenance; Software Process and Quality; Real-Time Embedded System Design; Software Architecture and Distributed Systems; Design Project; Object-Oriented Techniques; and Principles of Operating Systems. In the winter term of 1992-1993, a graduate course on software V&V was introduced at RMC. The course includes four assignments. The first assignment is a software inspection exercise where students apply different inspection techniques to examples of industrial software. The second assignment examines the test apparatus of an existing software system for adequacy, understandability, repeatability, maintainability, completeness, and automation effectiveness. In the third assignment, the students are asked to evaluate a commercial testing tool for a list of capabilities. The last assignment assigns students with a research paper in the area of V&V and are asked to summarize and present the paper to the class.

The Canadian Department of National Defense (DND) is responsible, through its software units, for the maintenance of tens of millions of lines of code for weapons systems. Managing this software is a major challenge which is exacerbated by a policy that prevents continued support from the original software contractor and by there being dozens of different computer types, several of which are in embedded systems. Each computer type comes with a unique set of languages, some of which are standard, some not. Procedures, platforms, and tools used by different software units within DND are distinct and evolving. Each unit selects tools that are suited to its needs. Since there is no best Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool for a specific need and CASE tools are evolving rapidly, different tools are chosen to perform similar operations. While these problems exist elsewhere, they are compounded in DND because it develops little software of its own yet must adapt to changing operational scenarios. DND must maintain and modify software developed by many organizations which use many different tools and techniques.

This article focuses on the licensing of software engineers in Canada. All Canadian provinces, and most U.S. states, have regulatory bodies charged with making sure that qualified engineers are easy to identify making sure that licensed engineers remain qualified, and regulatory bodies removing the license of engineers who violate laws or codes of practice. They have been granted trademarks and other legal means to prevent people from identifying themselves as engineers unless they have a license. Due to an internal jurisdiction dispute about "software engineering" at a Newfoundland university, software engineering programs at three Canadian universities were accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB), in June 2001. Graduates of these programs will be eligible for licensing as professional engineers after they gain supervised experience and pass the usual examinations on law and ethics. At each of these institutions, students have a choice between unaccredited computer science programs and accredited software engineering programs. The Ontario authorities have licensed about 300 engineers who specialize in software. Other provinces have been actively licensing software developers as well.

Focuses on Ottawa software company Software Kinetics. The firm's creation of the world's first software system for recovering black box data from aircraft crashes and turning it into video recreations; Its plan to sell a version of the animation system to airlines and others who might use it for training, quality control and other purposes; Background of the company and its president, David Webster.

Presents news items related to software engineering in Canada as of March 2003. Addition of professional audio support capabilities to prototyping software for embedded systems design; Features of multi-dimensional design capture tool NVisage.

Profiles Canadians Vinay and Veer Gidwaney, software entrepreneurs. Software that Vinay designed while a teenager; Development of CF1-Live, a help-desk product and adoption of the product by Novell Inc, IBM Corp. and a U.S. bank; Control-F1, co-founded by Vinay and Veer, who is chief executive officer; Recognition of Vinay as one of the world's top 100 young innovators by the 'Technology Review.'

Focuses on the formation of a task force for the accreditation of undergraduate software engineering programs in Toronto, Ontario. Institutions involved in the formation of the task force; Plans to create an accreditation board; Conformation of the accreditation process to the institutional standards.

Provides information on the different congresses and conventions concerning computer software engineering in the U.S. and Canada. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society; Goddard Space Flight Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; Association for Computing Machinery.

Introduces a digital/soft radio development system for signal intelligence applications developed by engineers at Spectrum Signal Processing in Burnaby, British Columbia. Features of the package; Reduction of development time; Compatibility of Spectrum's digital radio software architecture with several products.