MCTS exams - what are these certification trying to solve exactly?

Just walked out of a MCTS exam, the one in question is actually 70-630, after 30minutes.  The exam was allocated 2hours.  I'm full of mixed feelings.  Relief, but highly puzzled and unsatisfied by the whole exam.

The format is a series of questions - of the contents I can't comment, but of the quality of the questions…  Imagine something like this:

You need to do something in SharePoint, what do you need to do?

• Fiddle with Active Directory and do A
• Play with SQL Server and do B
• Configure SharePoint and do C
• Run Exchange Server and do D

No surprises which is the right answer.  Even if you don't know jack about SharePoint.  Repeat these questions for half an hour.

I try to justify why such exams (and by association, certifications) are necessary.

1. It proves you have experience with the technology, or at least, can find your way around in that technology, and use it to Actually Solve Problems
2. It proves that you have a good overall understand of the technology and product, and that you can be relied on to Implement Solutions with the technology
3. It makes the companies sponsoring you to do the test happy that they've got another certified professional, which they can then tell their clients

I then, try to justify, and fail badly, at understanding why the questions were give away…  Pay the money for the examination, most of it is a tax write-off anyway.  No previous training or experience necessary.  Pass the test.  Pat on the back.

1. Perhaps…  and this I can somewhat understand, it's just hard to write "good but wrong" answers.  You start with a question, with an answer.  Then you try to put in the typical two way-off answers, and one really close answer.
2. Perhaps the problem is with the multiple-choice format.  Itself, which lends to the traditional 4-answer format.

Suggestion

1. Make the exam harder.  Make people sweat, make them unsure whether they should submit the exam, or pause and go back and review one more time
2. Or get rid of the multiple choice format.  How about this:

Each question's answer is made up of a sentence with dropdown boxes where you can select keywords.  Imagine something like this:

You need to do something in SharePoint, what do you need to do?

[Fiddle/Play/Configure/Run] [Active Direcotry/SQL Server/SharePoint/Exchange Server] and do [A/B/C/D]

(imagine [xxx] is a drop down box).  You can even give partial answers for getting "really close" to the "right answer" but no cigar.

FiddlePlayConfigureRun Active DirecotrySQL ServerSharePointExchange Server and do ABCD as well as EFGH

Outlook (and blogs) are for code

After being annoyed with Outlook... well, forever... for always autocorrecting my code in my emails, it suddenly strikes me to find the auto correct settings to just stop this once and for all.

So apologies in advance from now until the end of time - if my "quotes" actually be doublequotes and my - (minus or hyphen) actually be a minus and not a dash.

Both are very important in being able to correctly paste code, I figure my human recipients could live with less than perfect typography ;-)

Turn off:

1. "Straight quotes" with "smart quotes"
2. "Hyphens (--) with dash (-)

In Outlook

in Windows Live Writer

This is something extremely simple, and I wonder I couldn't be the only person that has done this.  I can't understand why it took me 10 years... of pressing Undo right after pasting code into an email…  Goes to show you that most people never tweak the out of the box settings.

Windows 7 Troubleshooting Wizard is not a myth

I know this sounds crazy.   The network troubleshooting wizard actually works.

So I was on a designer’s machine and she was really having trouble with her wireless card – it’s reporting an IP Address conflict.

We figured that a simple:

ipconfig /release
ipconfig /renew

Should do the trick, but it was skipping the wireless adapter.  Confused – we stumbled across the wizard and clicked “Windows Network Diagnostics”.

To our amazement it asks us if we want it to fix the network for us. 

Behold!

Also explained why it wasn’t working before.

Certified Scrum Developer

John Sonmez made some comments that scrum had become all about money in his post:
http://simpleprogrammer.com/2010/03/31/scrum-for-the-money/
I highly disagree.

Before I go any further, continuing the thought of honesty, here’s my disclaimer:
I have participated in Certified Scrum Developer (.NET) series, and I’m extremely proud of the quality of the course, so take my views with a grain of salt. 
I am also, first and foremost, a .NET zealot – that means I value highly the technology stack from Microsoft as well as maximizing the ROI on the tools available to me. 
Though I will gladly confess that scrum is awesome at helping me get things done (ship products).

Confusion over costs

I honestly thinks that John Sonmez is mostly upset over the costs, which probably surprised him as greedy and blood thirsty.  But in the article he’s mixing up a great number of different costs involved – for very different things.

• Training to be CSM (~3 days)
  • $1195
  • Intended for: Individuals who will work on a Scrum team. The course has a strong emphasis on the role of the ScrumMaster.
• Training to be CSD (~5 days)
  • Start from CSM with additional electives, costs will vary, but I’m going to guess at least $2,500+
  • Existing trainers can offer electives to allow a CSM to extend to CSD
  • Existing CSM wanting to work with a particular toolset can add appropriate electives
• Training to be PSD (5 days / .NET)
  • $3995 – for 5 days hands on training
  • Entire training is packed and planned as a single continuous course.
  • There is high emphasis on the 3 pillars and how these form a synergy: Scrum, software development, and the tools (VS.NET 2010, TFS 2010)
  • Intended for: Individuals who will work on a Scrum team.  The course has a strong emphasis on the software developer team member, using Microsoft’s .NET tools
• Training to be PSD (Java)
  • N/A
• Training to be PSM
  • N/A

Confusion over Assessment

Most “training” includes one attempt at the certification.  If the trainee fails the assessment, then they can retake a second certification at following cost.

I think both SA and Scrum.org do not allow you to retake a third time if you failed the second retake.  You’ll need to repeat the training again.  So it’s not like Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) where you can just brute force exams until you pass.

• Certification CSM
  • $150
• Certification CSD
  • $150
• Certification PSD
  • $100
• Certification PSM
  • $500
• Certified Scrum in depth
  • $2000
  • Required to be a CSM trainer or PSD trainer

Learning should be free?

I think there’s a big difference over what one considers to be fair price.  At the minimum we’re looking at $1195 for the 3 day CSM training.

Honestly speaking - one does not need to be certified to practice scrum. 

Most of the materials are freely available online.  But please consider that these materials are developed and paid for by other people who are certified and delivering training, and by organizations such as SA and Scrum.org that’s promoting Scrum.

Troubles without formal training? 

1. There are an incredible amount of Scrum Practitioners that aren’t practicing scrum at all.
2. You may end up with Scrum-but. 
3. You may encounter issues in your project or organization, and you don’t have the knowledge or the backup support to keep going with scrum. 
4. You most likely will end up making your own ‘agile’ thing.

So here we are again, back at square one.  Do you need the training or don’t you need training?  Are you happy with how scrum works in your organization.  Or do you think you are only saying that you practice scrum, when in reality you are doing nothing that even remotely looks like scrum?

For the individual – there is intrinsic value by being trained.  Becoming a member of the SA / Scrum.Org groups also give you additional backup and support discussion.

For the company – the value is having you certified.  They can justify your training costs for tax write-off.  They can increase your rates if they get you to work for their client.  They can tell their stakeholders – hey we got a super professional now that’s taking care of our projects and look at our awesome burn down charts – our velocity is flying through the roof!

Certification should be cheap?

This one I really don’t know.  I know you can’t have it for free – since then everyone will be a certified scrum master and that will definitely degrade the quality of the entire certification programme.

Then at the minimum, there is an ongoing charge for membership fee to SA / Scrum.org – think of this as tithe for being a valued member of the community.  You can also see it as a support contract.  Either way, you are supporting them to keep on preaching Scrum, so you don’t have to.

Finally, to become certified requires both training, then assessment.  This isn’t about walking into some test centre and brute-forcing your way to certified.  No, you need to be trained by an authorized trainer, and then your training is assessed via a centralized exam issued by SA / Scrum.org

So you are juggling between people who see the value of being trained, assessed and certified, or people who cough at seeing any price tag.  I think the line lies somewhere in between, and given the success of the CSM programme I’d say it is just about right.

The case for Professional Scrum Developer

In the case of PSD – the course is still at its first steps with a lot of materials being crammed into a very short space of time.  I think the $4000 price tag is fully justified at the amount of training, knowledge and hands-on that you will receive at the 5 day training – believe me… we all thought the course at 5 days was too short for the number of topics available that we wanted to get through.  (At the minimum we wanted 2 more sprints)

• Scrum fundamentals
  • Scrum teams
  • Define your done criteria
  • Scrum hands-on practice (5-6 short sprints)
• TFS 2010 templates for Scrum
  • User Stories, work items in TFS
  • Burn down charts in TFS
  • Build Server
• Using VS.NET 2010 to work in a scrum team
  • Refactoring
  • ASP.NET MVC project
• Using VS.NET 2010 Test Manager to conduct tests
  • Creating unit tests
  • Fixing bugs in iterations
• Thorough Scrum reviews and retrospectives

Yes – all the materials is probably somewhere on the Internet and hidden in people’s blogs.  But to produce this 5 day course work requires months of preparation.

No doubt as the months move forward and the course material settles down the costs may fluctuate to better reflect market prices.  But I think trainers are currently already absorbing a lot of the costs to keep the initial offering at least affordable.

Microsoft wants, I guess, five thousand PSD (.NET) in the market before VS.NET 2010 is launched (and by the way it’s already launched).  If they are lucky, they probably may get to 500.  A very respectable number, but far short of the number they wanted.

Sum it all up by more links

• http://courses.scrum.org/classes/oceania
• http://www.scrumalliance.org/training
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/

For the love of SharePoint

Did quite a bit of blog reading tonight, mostly related to SharePoint, and it has prompted me to reflect the last 3 years and how my attitude towards SharePoint has gradually shifted. 

Here is a journey of a .NET developer who stumbled upon a technology called SharePoint, and finally made some sense of it.

2004: Does the world really need another Portal Software?

It was 2004 when I first head about this SharePoint portal server.  At the time where everyone was busy building first .NET applications, then ASP.NET applications.  The world was different then, perhaps a bit more black and white and mostly in code.

Everyone is out there building portals with web technologies, and failing that… build an engine for other people to build their portal upon.  Community Server, DotNetNuke, DasBlog… and these were the good ones.

So here’s this silly product from Microsoft, called SharePoint.  Immediately dismissed as a DotNetNuke –ish portal software and promptly forgotten.

2007: Many software seems to be built on top of the SharePoint platform, what is it?

I was working elsewhere in 2007.  Happily working on ASP.NET with nhibernate and spring.net.  SharePoint, unsubtly, crawled in front of the view screen again.

What intrigued me then was that Microsoft was refusing to let SharePoint die.  What surprised me was that it was no longer the portal software that I had in mind.  It had become a platform.

Still, I wouldn’t have given up my freedom with writing my own code to live within the confines of another platform that isn’t built by me.  (the "not invented here" syndrome)

So, performance point and BI flew past me.  Though in hindsight, I’m still pretty sure I wasn’t interested in that type of work…  May be in another decade I’d say differently.

2008: Jumping in the deep end.  The wars between SharePoint vs. Developer

I jumped into SharePoint some point in early 2008 – we were working on a heavily customized SharePoint publishing site, and there are a few areas where we needed the ASP.NET muscles to force SharePoint to bend to our will.  Considering myself an ASP.NET blackbelt, I jump in to sumo wrestle with the giant that is SharePoint.

I won.  Most of the time.  But SharePoint made me pay for my victories.  Years later, there are battle scars and silent tears for the hours that was thrown in to fight SharePoint.

It is in those hours that I learned:

• Why you should always build SharePoint packages, and have development, staging (test/UAT), and production SharePoint servers.
• Remembering the un-ghosted files
• Why SPDisposeCheck is awesome, because… if you don’t use it… the result is really un-awesome (see next point).
• How to read SharePoint logs – aka damn you SharePoint I hate you why do you hate me so
• Speak CAML – aka SharePoint gibberish
• Overwriting SharePoint with HttpModules
• Tell SharePoint (actually ASP.NET) to stop rendering those tables , and sigh the default masterpage is unusable

2009: Seeing SharePoint for what it really is.

Perhaps my lessons came later.  Perhaps it’s seeing the unnecessary wounds that I earned from wrestling, that got me to sit down, and work out what is SharePoint.  And what is the right thing to do.

So half way through 2008 and throughout all of 2009, I tell myself OK.  I’m going to give myself and this thing one chance and really work out what SharePoint is.

The Internet does not fail, and SharePoint knowledge is out there, free for you to find and to read.  The funny thing is that all these information has always been available.  But perhaps I was just too stubborn to turn my head to have a good look at SharePoint. 

If you want a reading list, this is the biggest list I could find:
http://www.dynamicevents.com/MCM/MCMSharePointPre-Reads.pdf
Recommended reading list for Microsoft SharePoint Certified Masters.  There are 81 articles and some are reference books.  You will probably never finish reading before SharePoint 2010 comes out with more required reading.

2010: At the edge of my seat.

As SharePoint became fun, I come to enjoy working in this platform.  Around mid 2009 after prompting from boss Adam Cogan, I wrote a brief presentation of 8 things I really wish SharePoint 2007 could do better, for me as a developer.  And presented it in Adelaide and Sydney SharePoint user groups.

As Microsoft show its hands with SharePoint 2010, I worked to update the same presentation to see if MS has addressed my wishes.

Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft addressed almost all my annoyances.  From CAML, packaging, debugging, BCS, search, and even a much cleaner DOM for our designers.

And even added more that I wasn’t too worried about: Silverlight, OData, ribbons and enterprise taxonomy.

Looking back over the last 3 years, our internal SharePoint installation has turned from an “oh we have a SharePoint running here somewhere” service, to an “essential production” service.  There was a time where if mail wasn’t available people would complain within 10 minutes, but SharePoint may be down for extended periods of time without people noticing or caring.  Not anymore.  Now, if SharePoint is unavailable for just 5 minutes due to a feature upgrade, you will hear people complain.

Too much writing, time to wrap it up

There’s still plenty more things to do in SharePoint, and plenty more things to do with SharePoint.  I’m glad I jumped on this path.  No idea where I’ll be in another 10 years, but I think I’ll always look back on 2010 with much fondness.