It’s Diwali season, time to light all your Certificates
Diwali, the festival of lights, is a major festival for us. Apart from all the lights, new clothes, great food, relatives, etc there is one other very important aspect of Diwali. Its about cleaning your place and getting rid of all the crap. I was just thinking about this and it occurred to me that this could be a good time to ask folks in the Agile community to get rid of all the crappy certificates that they have collected from those Scam Master training. Its time to set yourself free from the illusion of certification. What better time than Diwali to set them ablaze?
She’ll come back as fire, to burn all the liars,
And leave a blanket of ash on the ground.
With this, under the ASCI umbrella I would like to announce a series of 2 day free [almost free] workshops in India. I’m planning to call them UnCertification workshop. We won’t be giving you any certificate.
- Test Driven Design [TDD] - covering Unit testing, Refactoring and Simple Design - Object Orientation, Java and Eclipse IDE knowledge prerequisite.
- Agile Testing - focusing on various Test Automation strategies and tools that suit Agile projects
- Iteration Zero : How to setup a development environment for Agile teams, what tools are needed, how to manage configuration management, etc
- Release planning - Projection inception and planning techniques
All these would be hands on workshops. Which means, item 1-3 will require computers and item 4 will require lots of index cards and walls. If you are interested in attending any of these workshops, please drop me a note with your details and the city you would be interested in having one or more of these workshops conducted.
Thanks to Vikrant for creating the logo.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
“Scam Master” or “Scrum Master”
I would love to attend the workshop in Mumbai or Pune.
Let me know the schedule, once you are done.
This is what I asked you once & here you do it.
Thanks & Happy Diwali !!
November 6th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
To add further, how about evangelizing software companies to venture into agile software development (let it be under any name)
By agile, I mean - something that works well in the specific context.
Most folks (including me), wouldn’t be working for agile shops & even if they wish to do TDD, mocking, automated testing, build - they won’t be able to do - unless the management is convinced of it.
With your experience, this can be a great help.
Also, people who wish to do something into s/w development (apart from writing code & do the wash, rinse repeat (code, debug, fix repeat) - would like to be a part of continuous development cycle (personally as well as professionally)
Hence, mentoring is what is needed for most people by enlightened folks in the industry. I can say this as far as India is concerned.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:11 am
[...] sourced here [...]
November 8th, 2007 at 6:51 am
Hi Naresh, after a couple of your recent posts, I think it’s important to provide some differing opinions. I’ve tried to summarize my sense of your arguments in the quotes below, but if I’ve mischaracterized any of them, let me apologize in advance. (And what I write here is my personal opinion only, not that of the Scrum Alliance.)
* “The people who take the course are being ’scammed’.” I can’t speak for others, but at the end of my own CSM courses, people complete a questionnaire. One of the questions is “Thinking just about the _knowledge_ you gained from the course (not the certification itself), is the course worth the time required and the course fee?” The results: Yes = 96.7%. No = 3.3%. The CSM course is two very intense days of theory, practice, lecture, hands-on exercises, role-playing, and question-and-answer with a very experienced practitioner, and the people who take the course seem to find it very useful in preparing them for the myriad challenges of transforming their teams and organizations using Scrum.
* “The people who take the course come out thinking that because they have a certificate, they are experts.” In my experience, there are people who read a book about Scrum, and think they’re an expert. There are people who go to a free training course, and come out thinking they’re an expert. Ironically, with the CSM course, what I think is more common is people come _in_ thinking they’re an expert (”I’ve been doing Scrum for 6 months, I just need help solving some problems I’m having”), and they come out of the course realizing that they haven’t actually been doing Scrum at all! The only way you become a Scrum expert is by doing it a lot; but before that, it’s really helpful to have an intensive, hands-on training from a very experienced practitioner.
* “People are being charged money to take the course.” I think it’s wonderful that there are a range of choices out there for people. If someone wants to go to a free course, they can do it. Cool! If a company wants to pay for their employees to take a course, they can do that as well! If a company is stingy, or doesn’t want to pay for training, they can send their employees to a free class, and then keep 100% of the additional profits that comes from the knowledge gained! Everybody has a range of options, and nobody’s forced to do anything.
* “People are making a living doing this.” Look, it would be great if we could all find an employer who would pay us to be evangelists, and we could travel the world going to conferences, organizing events, etc. And I think the Agile community is really fortunate that such people exist, because they contribute an amazing amount. But the rest of us have to make a living, and most Scrum Trainers do this with a combination of teaching, consulting, and doing software development.
* “Some people take the course for the wrong reasons.” Sure, people do things for lots of different reasons. There are some people who attend Agile conferences because they’re interested in the topic, there are others who go because they want to find a new job. But we let them all in. There are probably people who attend the CSM course mainly for the purpose of getting a certificate saying they attended the course. However, in the process of attending the course for the wrong reason, they are forced to go through 16 hours of hands-on experience with some of the toughest situations that ScrumMasters will encounter, and they’re forced to hear 16 hours of other peoples’ experiences with what happens when things go right, go wrong, and everything in between. They may take the course for the wrong reason, but they’re forced into contact with the right reason.
* “Burn the certificates!” That’s your choice. But personally, I think there’s a lot of other paper that is in much greater need of burning. Things like Gantt charts, Pert charts, frozen designs, 200-page PRD’s, management weekly update reports, etc. etc. etc. Every minute spent anguishing over “CSM certification – evil or not?” is another minute of good people being distracted from the real battle that we’re all on the same side of.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Two things following on from Peter:
1. CSM is not the final stage of qualification - it’s the beginning. CSP and CSC follow and they are far more stringent then the gateway qualification.
2. I work for a HUGE multinational corporation. One of the main reasons they accepted adopting Agile was because there was an industry recognised certification available in it. (Scrum). Enterprises need that perceived value. Once you’re wormed in - then you can start working on that thinking….
November 9th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
I say burn’em all, the focus is wrong. The arguement above perpetuates a belief in prophets and heros.
We don’t need either.
November 12th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
[...] It’s Diwali season, time to light all your Certificates [...]
November 13th, 2007 at 6:01 am
Pete, just curious. Have you tried running a CSM course where you did not offer any certificate? I’m wondering what would happen then? Would people still show up with the same interest? Based on what you’re telling, I would assume they would. But it might be an interesting experiment to see what happens.
November 13th, 2007 at 6:09 am
Nigel,
>> 1. CSM is not the final stage of qualification - it’s the beginning. CSP and CSC follow and they are far more stringent then the gateway qualification.
How does it matter if there are 20 more gates. I’m trying to say that we are starting on the wrong note. May be this can explain http://blogs.agilefaqs.com/2007/09/12/cerfitication-drives-me-insane/
>> 2. I work for a HUGE multinational corporation. One of the main reasons they accepted adopting Agile was because there was an industry recognized certification available in it. (Scrum).
I’m not too sure if many people will agree that CSM is an industry recognized certificate. Forget the Industry, a lot of people in the Agile Community itself does not recognize it. Its only a handful of people in the Agile community who like it for various reasons.