Establishing Effective Software Engineering Boards

Epidemic modelling has informed public health policy worldwide to manage the COVID-19 pandemic to assess strategies like lockdown, mask-wearing, track-and-tracing, and using apps. However, some high profile models have been shown to be very badly engineered, exposing a fundamental problem: how do expert scientists in fields like epidemiology do expert-quality software engineering to assure their models are dependable? This is a serious problem for epidemiology, climate science, and other public policy areas. Ethics Boards are in almost all research institutions. The need for Software Engineering Boards (SEBs), analogous to Ethics Boards, is becoming crucial, but software is invisible and poor software causes harm. We therefore propose to research how SEBs could provide advice and approval for relevant software development. An international survey and building a website to refine the idea will lead to a thoughtful checklist and action plan that has widespread backing. In particular, it will help establish the appropriate operational scale and details (membership, qualifications...) for SEBs to be most effective. In the future, we envisage critical software engineering (e.g., pandemic models informing policy) will have benefitted from SEB engagement, and will have formal approval much like good medical research has ethics approval today.