Mar 31 2009
World Agile Qualifications Board
Agile sells. It’s the new black. Companies are trying to roll out agile on a huge scale and even buy it as a software package. Teams sell themselves as agile as if it was the single guarantee of success that customers need, and people seem to fall for that. As agile adoption gets wider and more shallow, lots of teams struggle with those practices and projects are failing. Agile coaches used to be the best people in the business. A huge demand for agile people lead to mass production and a huge fall in quality.
This is a problem significant enough to be mentioned in the keynote for Agile 2008, the biggest meeting on everything Agile in the world last year, with Robert C. Martin calling for “Craftsmanship over Crap”. When Martin asked the audience who has at least once been significantly impeded by bad code since going agile, most people raised their hands. In November last year, Jim Shore wrote that “rescuing Scrum teams” keeps people like him in the business today, warning against “dubious ScrumMaster certificates [issued] to people who demonstrated competence in connecting butt to chair for two days”.
Agile simply became a buzzword that gets slapped on to anything and everything these days. As with anything else, a huge inflation of currency leads to the fall of value. Keith Braithwaite joked about avoiding to use “the A word” any more during XPDay in London late last year. So with everyone and everything agile these days and low quality in abundance, how do companies really know who they can turn to for advice or hire to avoid these problems?
Agile certifications to the rescue
Certificates to the rescue! Apparently, sometime in May they someone called the “World Agile Qualifications Board” will launch a certification pilot in London and then conquer the world, with the web site suggesting that they will offer training all over Europe, in India and the United States. Training companies have been issuing loads of certificates around the world for decades, so what is so new about this that I got so upset?
First of all, their first training course is a complete rip-off of the excellent Agile Testing book by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory without giving any credit to the authors. The course summary is literally the table of contents from the book verbatim copied into a web page. The book is great and I’d expect people to start building training courses based on it, but at least be polite enough to give credit where credit is due. After a lot of buzz about that on Twitter and the agile-testing mailing list, they have now deleted the course contents from the web site (good luck selling a course with no description), but at the time I wrote this you could still see it in google cache. The second thing is the name of the organisation, which really hit a nerve. World certifications? Yeah right. Elisabeth Hendrikson was the first to pick up on this and write against it. With such an aggressive plan and ripping off other people’s work, this seems a sure recipe for disaster.
If there was a world governing body that people could trust for this, it would probably be the Agile Alliance. Their position on certification is clear: employers should have confidence only in certifications that are skill-based and difficult to achieve. Yet, most of the certificates issued today are very easy to achieve and take only a day or two of work, or even just attending the course. (WAQB pilot is a two-day participating event.)
Who the heck are the World Agile Qualification Board members?
So who exactly is behind these ‘world’ certifications? The web site only has a web contact form with no e-mail or address, and the only e-mail address I found on the site is waqb@live.no (spam scanners feel free to index this) on the google calendar page. As the pilot starts in the UK I checked the England Companies House register but they don’t know of anyone called World Agile Qualifications Board or WAQB. If they are an English company, they haven’t published the company details online which technically breaks the English law. They are not members of the Agile Alliance, and the whois record points to a web development company which hosts the site, and since posting this originally I got e-mail from the web development company claiming that they are not behind WAQB, but they haven’t answered my request for more information on who really is behind it.
Buyer beware
All I can say about this is buyer beware – send your CV with certificates such as these to a place where serious people work and you’ll almost certainly end up in the bin straight away. Boasting about a certificate that is not respected on a CV or a resume demonstrates two things. First – the applicant has no real world experience (hence the easy-to-get certification). Second – the applicant has no real knowledge, as they regard the easy-to-get certificate course as something so important that it should be on their CV. A XKCD-style bar chart on how HR people and programmers read resumes from Hanovsolutions recently got a lot of attention on Digg and Reddit, listing “took a certification course in technology” among the biggest transgressions. Just about two years ago I suggested a simple CV filter: if a certification is displayed prominently, bin the candidate straight away.
Certificates in software have always been a controversial topic. Tom DeMarco called them a murky matter in 1998 and that’s probably the best description for the whole thing to this date, especially for agile practices. The whole idea was to put people before processes but that is very hard to teach. It takes a long time to learn a craft, but time is something the IT industry often does not have. One way to get up to speed is to take a course from a respected author, and I do think that courses are a great way to spread the knowledge, but it is not a replacement for experience. Courses enable people to take the initial step and then learn on their own. They are there to kick-start, not to replace experience. (Btw, for the benefit of people looking for a course that deals with the same topics as the Agile Testing book, Lisa announced that she and Janet will be soon offering a course but “will not be certifying anyone”).
Alan Page suggested that the WAQB site might be an April’s Fool joke discovered early. That would not surprise me a lot, as several other spoof certification sites were launched, including Agile Certification Now and Agile Object-Oriented Maturity Certification, offering quick online certification which actually displays a very good page on why software certificates don’t work on the end of the process. Elisabeth Hendrikson said “I’d rather feel stupid for falling for the joke than outraged at the reality.” and that’s really how I feel as well. I’m writing this post as a desperate attempt that if its not a joke, people searching on Google for that company will see this post and give up before it is too late.
Alternatives to certificates
Laurent Bossavit and Brian Marick launched an alternative to certification boards, a network based on personal recommendations titled We Wouch For, with the idea to allow people to gather “certifications” from their coworkers and respected authorities in the community. So far, this has not really taken off, with most registered users either without recommendations or with a single recommendation. Brian Marick and Steve Freeman are the only ones with a significant number of recommendations which honestly makes it a bit pointless as they are already very well known and respected members of the agile community.
At the moment, the only answer to the “who are you going to call” question (apart from the obvious answer) is to hire respected people from the community. Join a few mailing lists for the topic that is of interest and invest some time in tracking what goes on there. Ask members of those lists who they would recommend and then try to hire those people. Again, for the benefit of people looking for help with agile testing, I’ve mentioned some popular mailing lists on the resources page of the acceptancetesting.info portal.
Image credits: John H. and Sundeip Arora
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waqb seems to involve Steen Lerche-Jensen, who is (as per LinkedIn) associated with softwaretest.no and test4pro.com
That makes sense, both those sites look very similar to waqb.
Gojko,
I’ve spoken personally with Ben. He really has nothing to do with it. He runs the Doodlekit company, so likely the servers are on the same host, which is pretty normal. I feel very confident that he doesn’t have anything to do with it, and so I’d ask that you remove his information from the above (especially the bit about finding the phone number). I don’t think he should be punished for something one of his customers did, that isn’t in any way illegal. Just annoying.
Cory
I co-launched Agile Certification Now on April 1, 2007 (!) and not two weeks ago. I won’t reveal my co-designers, opting instead to let them reveal themselves if they wish. We were obviously well ahead of our time. Well over 6,000 people have “requested certification”, and we have had two serious inquiries asking about the certification program in that time.
Talking about vendors hijacking agile: I peeked into a small conference in Italy. A couple of interesting speech, but mostly vendor crap.
Some excerpts:
- “Our project management tool now supports agile too”
- “We updated our tool to support agile namings”
- “We renamed ‘use cases’ to ‘customers stories’ to support agile”
but also
- “The problem with testing is that too many teams don’t have separate testers”
- “Companies are not using modern estimation technologies such as Function Points”
- “We need more metrics”
- “You can’t test everything in an application”
sad sad sad
Cory Foyon is correct. Ben is my business partner and half owner of our company Doodlekit (http://doodlekit.com). Doodlekit is an online website builder that ‘WAQB’ used to create their website. They are in no way affiliated with us.
As Cory said, we would appreciate if you would remove your accusations about Ben from the post.