[OSGeo-Discuss] Certification only; stay out of training :-)

[Jody Garnett]

Sorry the rant was not clear; I expect the test taker to be proficient at QGIS. I was just taking the time to describe how the test would be different from a normal certification test.

The actual testing criteria would need to be set by those offering training courses; or perhaps by the QGIS PMC?

My own take is that:
1) The vast majority of the test would be devoted to using the application; covering common GIS tasks; and a few advanced ones to get a spread
- I assume the visual results could be added as attachments for review.
- I would expect many of the questions to be of the form "download the natural earth countries" and produce this visual; send us your qgis project file for review
- Or here is a range of web services publishing world health organisation; answer the following questions

2) I assume a certification program would have a number of levels.
- I would only think of someone building the system from scratch to apply to a server product like GeoServer or MapServer where a user needs to apply a security fix *now* (if you are certified you should not have to hire a consultant or wait for the next nightly build - grab the patch from the issue tracker and get the servers back online!)

3) Even for the "skills and knowledge in using the product in question" we would need to cover familiarity with how to communicate and where to find answers.
- I would expect the test to cover material beyond that in the training course requiring test taker to use the website correctly; possibly to look up information on an older version of QGIS?
- You may also wish to have them check the SLD specification to show that they know where the OGC docs are? This could even be by way of updating an SLD file to be compatible with an older version of QGIS that does not support the interpolate function from SE?
- As for how to handle this - perhaps asking test takers to submit resources used during the test (and explain that they are part of the content being tested). It is a little bit more difficult if QGIS supports an IRC channel; perhaps they could attach IRC logs.

Still the above discussion is one for the group setting the certification criteria; I was more interested in the foundation (as a rule) stress the open source and community involvement side of certification. In part so that those earning certification are actually useful to their employers.

-- 
Jody Garnett


On Monday, 13 June 2011 at 10:40 PM, Stephen Woodbridge wrote:

> Jody,
> 
> What are you trying to certify the test taker is proficient at?
> 
> The above seems to focus on OpenSource developemt skills, but I would 
> think that QGIS v1 certification should be more focused on how 
> proficient that take is with QGIS v1. So there is probably two levels of 
> skill that the test should identify.
> 
> 1. skill and knowledge in using the product in question
> 2. skill and knowledge in developing and product process of development 
> said product
> 
> -Steve
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