I’m certified, I must be good!
It seems that the whole morning has been spent listening to “I am Agile Certified you know”. If this is the mentality of the Agile workforce out there, then we must be in trouble in 2009. This so reminds me of the Sun Certification in the early 2000’s and back then it seemed that is was a way of confirming average knowledge and not commercial excellence.
Would you hire someone just because they are Certified ?
Ha! Ha!
About a year or two back I noticed that there was a spate of blue chip companies saying ‘I want to Agile certify my development teams’ from top to bottom – in the belief that magically their whole company would turn ‘Agile Enabled’.
At the level of the individual ‘Certification’ to me implies the most basic level of understanding of a subject.
At the company level, ‘certification’ without organisational change and a whole wider understanding of the subject is also meaningless.
Anyway – best practice in software development seems to continue to evolve at pace. Certification is like achieving the 100m swimming badge. A first step.
I wouldn’t *not* hire someone becaue they were or were not certified. But I would be deeply suspicious of anyone who thought you can be certifiably “agile”. The problem is you cannot certify what is essentially a philosophy. Agility is a way of thinking, a state of mind.
Scrum Certification is the best example of this farce, spend 2 days in the company of a scrum training and you get a piece of paper saying you can run an agile project.
Atleast the Scrum Alliance has realised this and is now looking at a more exploratory exam at the end to ensure you have actually learnt something from the course.
Agree with the comments above, its not what paper you have its whats you have done. I know several ‘Scrum Masters’ who wouldn’t know TDD or CI if it bit them but they now consider themselves Agile coachs.
What hope do we have in this industry while certification costs so little and attempts to mean so much