Agile Certification a Community Driven Proposal

Posted by Mark Levison on May 27, 2008 01:00 AM

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Dissatisfied with other Agile Certifications, S.M. Kripanidhi has proposed a "Community Certified Agile Practitioner".

Kripanidhi has a number of reasons for believing certification valuable:

• Recognize good Agile Practitioners
• Allow potential clients, employers to identify good Practitioners
• Provide a degree of credibility to the Agile Community

He suggests that we use local communities to judge if the practitioner is worthy of certification:

Who better knows an Agile Practitioner other than the actual
stakeholders (manager,customer,team,peers,community) involved with
him. They are the best judge if the Agile Practitioner is good in
Agile.

Kripanidhi proposes five certifications: Practitioner (an individual team member), Leader, Trainer, Coach and Evangelist (existing and emerging thought leaders). Certifications would be renewable on an annual basis.

David Spann suggests we start by asking who the audience of these certifications and asking why they want a certification:

Who: the person with the certificate
Why: they want to have proof of accomplishment and ability the world
can easily understand, e.g., a college degree, an author, a certified
practitioner

Now that the community is too large for everyone to know each other Laurent Bossavit and Brian Marick have implemented the first version of an alternative to Certificates. Replacing certificates individuals make formal statements of certification, example:

I, Laurent Bossavit, a member of the agile community, certify Rachel Davies as having outstanding skills in Retrospective Facilitation, based on the following evidence: I attended a Retrospective which she facilitated at a conference and took away key learnings from the experience.

When you've collected several statements in a given area potential employers or clients will know that you have some expertise. In Starting Ideas a number of possibilities are explored that explain how this individual statements can be turn into a useful measure(s) of trust.

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