Unveiling! *The Uncertifiable*

Here goes the Uncertifiable badge Inspired by James Bach’s post Conscientious Uncertification

Hiiiyyyeeaaa !! [Kung fu panda’s war cry :)]

Here is my one cent, below is another cent “why am I Uncertifiable?”

Thank You James Bach for permitting to use Buccaneer Scholar image.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading James Bach’s Secrets of A Buccaneer-Scholar book and strongly recommend reading it. The book gives a great confidence on how Self- Education and Pursuit of Passion can lead to a Lifetime of Success. Most of software testers from India are either B.E or MCA degree holders. I can’t understand why we need yet another certification?

I love to hear from those certified people how that helped in day-to-day testing activity? Did that help to improve testing skills? Does that help the clients? Does that make an expert? I can accept those certifications one and only if it helps to solve practical problems and if that improves questioning and thinking skills. Yes, you can learn some theoretical definitions of testing terms, but wait “You Can never be sure if you have a correct definition, but don’t ever stop trying to get one” from Are your lights on? Sadly these certifications never allow you to try or question it.

Please use your sapience to make decisions. I know many do certification because Mr. X or company forces\recommends. In this commercialized world both Mr. X and companies are either fooled by marketing or they are lazy to find better way of judging testers skills. Most Mr. X doesn’t even know the syllabus of such certificate programs pathetic.

Also remember you can’t just go to Mr. X and say I can’t do certification. If you need a change find replacements first. Start writing blogs, share your ideas, be proactive, and speak with customer support team to understand the customers’ better, try to bring in new ideas and innovation into testing. Remember any idea should help to progress and never be an overhead. If you are interested in installation, configurations of Servers learn, set up and control the QA environment. Learn some Open Source tool and scripting language like Ruby or Perl, and then apply them in to improve the testing process.

After three to four years of experience in the industry I realized most are running behind such impractical certification and fantasy automation. Even though my sapience says those are not impractical, I was not able to judge myself as I lack experience, until I came across Dr Cem Kaner and James Bach web sites. So explore, think, analyze, discuss, debate, fail, learn, unlearn until you are learn the truth. There is a saying in Tamil “Mere seeing or hearing an information does not reveal the truth, investigate hard to learn the truth”. So learn the truth, stand up and fight bravely or be a Slave.

Yes, it is a challenging path unfortunately you have only two paths a challenging one or a boring one. Remember The Matrix movie? Morpheus gives Neo a choice between two pills: red to learn the truth, blue to return to the world as he knows it. Choose Your pill and I know I can’t wake people who pretend to sleep.

Happy Learning the Truth!

Dhanasekar – The Uncertifiable