Software developers need to develop their own professional standard, or politicians will do it for them. That’s what “Uncle” Bob Martin argues in this interview starting about 28:00:
Healthcare.gov was awful. That’s a case where a software failure interfered with a public policy. Whether you agree with that policy or not that should scare the hell out of you, because the next public policy may be one much more important and if our software can’t cope with it we could be in a really deep, deep hole.
At some point or another, some software team is going to screw up so badly that there is a disaster of tremendous loss of life. At that point the politicians of the world will decide they have to do something about it. If we are not there with a set of minimum standards that we follow, practices that we follow, if we can’t convince those politicians that we have been behaving professionally and that this was an accident–if we can’t convince them that we weren’t being negligent–then they’ll have no choice but to regulate us. They’ll pass laws about which languages we use, what platforms we can program on, what books we have to read, and so on. It will not be a good outcome. I don’t want to be a civil servant.
