I attended a panel presentation, "To Certify or Not to Certify," at Agile 2007 in Washington, D.C. The presenters included several esteemed members of the agile community, including (but not limited to!) Ron Jeffries, Michael Feathers, Mike Cohn, and Angela Martin. I thought the panelists offered some interesting but far from comprehensive thoughts on certification. The panel deliberately avoided "hot" or contentious questions, in favor of a subdued give-and-take on the topic.

What I heard was essentially this message: "certification is inevitable, so we should try to beat those other guys (whoever they are) to the punch." Presumably, the interest would be to build good certification, so good that those greedy other guys don't come up with poor certification. (The Agile Alliance issued a position paper on what they thought the value proposition was for certification; it can be found here.)

Shortly after the conference, I was invited to and joined an online action/discussion forum consisting of some of the aforementioned panel members. I asked for some goals for certification, thinking that there are many paths to many different kinds of certification. The first step toward any solution is knowing what the problems are, and how much of each problem you're trying to solve.

If there is a discussion forum metaphor for blank stares, that's what I got with my posts. A different action group formed, one where a decision was already made to build some sort of trust network (based on a notion similar to Google page ranks). I wasn't so warmly invited to this second group. Perhaps my pointed posts helped kill the first certification forum.

Never one to be subdued by rejection, my response is to move forward on my own and establish a basis for a certification program for test-driven development (TDD). My intent is to produce a skill-based TDD curriculum, one about as rigorous as a typical university course. Is there a test? Is there a certificate? That's probably not something I can build as a sole proprietor, but I'm open and ready to work on creating a standards body for TDD certification.

What are my motivations? They of course include profit, but they also include my strong interest in improving the level of professionalism in software development. While some decry profit motivations based on their belief system, certification schemes are primarily about profit, and I believe competition usually drives improvement. Let's get competing!

posted by Jeff L.  # 10/02/2007 10:25:00 PM Database TDD Blogs