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May
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Uncle Bob Martin says programmer certification is bad. He supposes that if you start giving out certifications to people that someone will assume those certifications mean something. They will start hiring certified people preferentially, or stop hiring non-certified people entirely. This would be bad, because certification is almost certainly a poor measure of whether you should hire someone. Uncle Bob is right. Ron Jeffries suggests that the Scrum Alliance ought to just drop the word certification. He asserts that sending people to classes is useful because they get exposed to ideas that they may not be adequately exposed to otherwise. However, going to a class should not be called “certification,” because it is imprecise and alienates parts of the community it means to serve. Ron is right. Tobias Mayer has complained that the new Certified Scrum Developer course is no better than the Certified Scrum Master course since both are merely a couple days of training during which a human being can only retain so much. Tobias is wrong for a number of reasons. First of all, he’s not really in a position to judge something he’s never seen or done. He is also wrong because the CSD class has the one thing that all of the official Scrum Alliance classes have lacked to date – relevance to software development. Attendees of a CSD class have to write software. This is supposed to have something to do with Agile, and the Manifesto says we value working software. So, maybe we should write some? Tobias is right to say that this isn’t enough, but it is the very first step in the right direction… ever. I believe that it is absolutely valuable to attend a CSM or CSD course. The CSM course ought to be called, “Intro to Scrum: Do Not Try This At Home.” The CSD course ought to be called, “Intro to Extreme Programming: No Really, Someone Might Get Hurt.” The two of them together are barely a starting point. They are a little bit better than reading a book and trying to get someone to pay you to attempt what it says (The way many of us learned, including myself.) They still aren’t enough by themselves. To be able to do this stuff well, I think you need at least the following things:
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I think you are wrong when you say the “CSD class has the one thing that all of the official Scrum Alliance classes have lacked to date – relevance to software development”. If you can say something like that, then I am not sure what you think Scrum is about and what the other classes have been striving to teach.
Since I want to understand what you are trying communicate, can you explain your ideas better?
Hi Carlton:
I assert that you could get through the CSM or CSPO without even knowing what software is. These programs have been deliberately designed to focus on product development and not on software per se. That flexibility may be valuable to some.
However, ask yourself this question: how many people do you know who are trying to use Scrum for software development? vs something else? Maybe we should be spending more time talking about software.
I submit that it is no coincidence many software development shops who adopt Scrum still manage to suck at software development. I don’t think I’m unique in feeling that way. It is the reason that the CSD program was created.
If this is what you believe I challenge BigVisible to drop the word certified from your course offerings and rename them in the manner you suggest. I will look forward to a blog posting on your findings as to whether it changes the booking rate and or profile of candidates participating.
Hi Mick:
These are Scrum Alliance courses we are talking about. BigVisible participates in the Scrum Alliance’s program by having several certified trainers who offer courses. It is not on us to unilaterally change the program.
I attributed the suggestion to drop “certified” to Ron Jeffries who wrote about it here: http://xprogramming.com/articles/scrum-alliance-drop-certified/
My alternate titles were obviously (I hoped and intended) tongue-in-cheek. However, I stand by the implication that if /all/ you have done is take one of these courses you almost certainly have no idea what you are doing. I don’t think that’s terribly controversial.
In the name of truth in advertising, I like the course names “Intro. to Scrum” and “Intro to XP”.
As far as the relation of Scrum to software, I prefer the definition: Scrum is an interaction discipline between members of a creative team and between that team and those paying for their creative work. The context in which Scrum was conceived is software development and the practices serve that context well. Scrum discipline wraps good business discipline (Lean – domain specific) and sw engineering discipline (XP).
Scrum’s concern is building the right thing, while XP’s concern is building things right.
There’s nothing new in what I’m saying, so I’m surprised it needs repeating.
Regarding certification – an Agile Coach I admire, at at Agile 2007 said, Scrum is a brilliant piece of social engineering. Ken Schwaber hates to admit it, but it has made him millions and been a license to print money for a bunch of people. At the same time it has been a great marketing campaign to start a conversation on the big issue – Big Up Front Design fails. I find seeing software development as more like R&D than construction or manufacturing creates the right mind set for the rest of the issues. This has to be balanced with acknowledging what really needs to be discovered from that which we already know for the project at hand.
Scrum doesn’t say anything about building the right thing either. It just assumes that the person in the role of Product Owner knows what should be built and that the Team knows how to do that. Each of those things are false more often than we care to admit.
If we actually wanted to know that we had built the right thing we would need some way to evaluate it, such as acceptance testing and/or frequent releases (to customers). Scrum itself doesn’t ask us to do anything like that.