When Jean gets back from Mexico and we shape our plans more completely for certification, we will post again. In that post, I will work to specifically answer these questions.

It seems we see a very similar structure as you do. I am very excited to share our efforts in more detail.

Happy New Year,
Ryan

However, pursuing such rigor has significant issues, and consequences, of its own such as:

1) How to bootstrap this effort, i.e., who will be the people, at the outset, who will judge the competence of others and who will decide who they are and why others will not be given this authority?

2) What body of knowledge will be defined as the basis of such certification and who will do so, maintaining it on an ongoing basis?

3) Most certification efforts are backed by some recognized professional societies that do much more than just certify people, e.g., interact with academia to influence educational programs, work with government on licensing, publish research in their fields.

4) What impact on fees/salaries can be expected, or desired, based on having people who can claim the certification as opposed to those who cannot?

5) Should all practitioners be expected to have such certification or will there be grades of certification from basic applied skill through supervisory/approval as in engineering?

6) Regardless of the intentions of those who try to set up such a certification effort, can (or should) the use of the results of such an effort be controlled to avoid unintended consequences?

And there are more such things.

I take the idea of substantial certification efforts seriously and believe issues such as those I mention above need to be considered. At the very least, any such effort should have a position on why they have chosen to address some issues and not others.

As a first step, we should seek to eliminate, or discredit, certifications that using testing and require that the training to qualify to take the testing must come from sources only approved by the certification body. This is a clear conflict of interest situation that more than one certification effort in software faces.