To certify or not to certify

Abstract

One of the problems the agile community is currently facing is how do we encourage the things that are agile and discourage those that are not? As agile software development has grown in popularity we discover that some people claim to "do agile" and yet "do not", and no one calls them on it. The principles of the Agile manifesto and the practices within each of the methods becomes diluted and lost. Is certification the answer? Tom DeMarco comments that "though the rationale for certification is always societal good, the real objective is different: seizure of power. Certification is not something we implement for the benefit of the society but for the benefit of the certifiers". So certification is clearly a complex and interesting area and ripe for debate. This panel brings together industry practitioners with differing perspectives and experiences of certification; the audience should come prepared to both ask and answer questions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.