One of the tutorials at CAST2007 was a debate between all the major players in the certification issue to try and air their side of the story in the belief that average testers care about this. The origin of the debate lies in CAST2006 being partially hijacked by the issue. I’ve been arguing for some time now that certification is a bug red herring and distracts a lot of smart people from doing smart things. Typically the arguments can be broken down into buckets that somewhat resemble the following.

  • One vs. Many certifications
  • Body of Knowledge being certified
  • Process of certification
  • Organization doing the certification
  • Personalities behind the organizations doing the certifying
  • What being certified means

The thing is though, that a lot of the issues are ones which the participants have become emotionally (and professionally) tied to. Once this happens, opinions cannot be changed, just enflamed. Was the great unified certification strategy and body of knowledge going to result from the debate? Not a chance. How about in the opening keynote where certification threatened to derail the rest of the discussion? Even less chance.

This circles back to my last post on the LAWST Facilitation Method and the card that was missing from CAST2007. The rat-hole card. As soon as certification was mentioned in the keynote I started rummaging through my bag looking for the rat-hole card from TWST. The facilitators would have known what it meant.

So this has been an axe I’ve been grinding for awhile and I admit to being anti-certification debate but have not really had any numbers to back-up the belief that I am not a minority in this. Now I do.

Tim Coulter has a vested interest in the Open Certification Project (he wrote the question server) and as a result attended the debate. According to his post 9 (+/- 2) people sat in on the debate. That is 4.89% of the 184 total CAST2007 attendees and 7.96% of the 113 who stuck around for the tutorial day. Inquires to organizers confirmed 11 participants (18 people in the room – 5 panelists – Tim – facilitator) which puts the percentages up a bit, but not by a meaningful amount.

According to one of the lightning talks, the debate is already over; at least in Europe. Abusing the above stats by taking them without a grain of salt, can we please lay off the debate of certification for testers? Or can we permanently pin a rat-hole card on the topic to stop inflicting other people’s agendas on the rest of us?