Certified ScrumMaster

I became a Certified ScrumMaster today via the Scrum Alliance. I know certifications are worth very little, but the training and exam prep was definitely very useful and, more importantly, I’m implementing Scrum techniques on the new project I’m working on: Planning the sprint ahead, daily scrums, sprint reviews and trying to remove obstacles for the team.

Tags: agile, Certification, scrum

Details of the new Sun Java Programmer Plus Certification

I posted previously about the new Sun certification exam announced at Java One, but there weren’t many details at the time. However, I found this blog post which points to Sun’s web site where they announce and give details of the new Sun Java Programmer Plus Certification. Apparently is will launch on July 22. No word on when the old SCJP will be retired, but I suspect it will be soon. Sun say that they will “provide a public notification of at least 90 days in advance of any exam retirement”.

Tags: Certification, Oracle, Sun

Is Sun’s Java Certification Model changing?

Although I was unfortunately unable to attend Java One last month, I did spot this post on TheServerSide about how Sun announced the Java Certification process may be changing from a rote memorization approach to a more hands-on coding approach.

As someone who has taken the SCJP and SCEA exams, and blogged about it’s pros and cons, I am interested to hear about any changes or improvements.

Unfortunately the only info on the web I can find is this blog posting linked to from the article. There doesn’t seem to be anything posted on the certification part of Sun’s web site. If anyone has any information of the new format, I’d love to hear it!

Tags: Certification, Sun

Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java 6

I recently passed my Sun Certified Java Programmer for Java 6 exam. Although I am already a Sun Certified Enterprise Architect and I had already taken the 1.2 version of the Programmer exam several years ago, I thought it would be good to get a refresher. Although it is always good to go over the basics of Java again, I think this is the last time I will take it. My biggest gripe is that a lot of the material covered is something I’d simply check the Java API docs for in my your day to day work. But perhaps that is a necessary evil and it has forced me to learn some of the topics I hadn’t been paying enough attention to including Generics, Enumerations and Assertions, as well as reviewing older material such as threads and inner classes. Also it never does any harm to go over the fundamentals of OO again: encapsulation, polymorphism, inheritance and coupling/cohesion.

I have put together some thoughts on The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of SCJP.

Tags: Certification