The certification team gathered for a two day long kickoff sprint in Munich to define the certification outline, work out questions and define tasks. If you’re interested in getting certified as TYPO3 CMS Certified Developer or want to know how our days were, read on!
On 11th and 12th of February, the certification reached the first milestone defined for the year 2015: Finally kick off the CMS developer certification program which already has a high demand. The sprint took place at <link http: www.arrabiata.de _blank>Arrabiata Solutions GmbH in Munich, with both old and new team members. Overall, seven people were working hard on bringing a new certification to life.
Goals
Our sprint goals were straightforward: We wanted to define what a certified developer has to know, which topics the exam asks about, and use the remaining time to generate questions. We didn’t set a concrete goal on the last task as it is quite hard to estimate how many questions we’re able to generate, but I thought we’d create around 40 questions. To set this in relation: One exam has 75 questions, publishing a certification program requires at least two exam forms, and each form has to have around 80% unique questions.
Day 1
With a cozy start as usual – coffee, buttered pretzel, and smalltalk – the team brainstormed about how a candidate’s profile in terms of TYPO3 CMS and modern extension building has to look like, which topics have to be well known, and how questions about hands-on experience in certain topics can be checked throughout the exam.
«A TYPO3 CMS Certified Developer has to have experience collected through projects, should know the architecture, design patterns, best practices, and a fair share of internals both TYPO3 CMS and the extension framework relies on. He/She is able to implement an extension completely in a state-of-the-art way and writes clean code by following the TYPO3 Coding Guidelines (CGL), and is well versed in a wide range of topics, from the initial setup of an extension up to the point of publishing it in the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER).»
As we now had a vision, we started working in small groups to create questions and reviewed them afterwards to make sure they’re technically correct. At the end of our first day, we already created and reviewed 42 questions. We basically reached all our previously set goals. With an amazing feeling about the work we’ve done so far, we ended the first day, joking about how we’re going to having a finished exam by the end of our second day.
Day 2
The second day began, at 9:10, everyone sat at the table with a coffee and their laptop, starting the day with the same jokes we ended the first one, but with two people less than yesterday. Again, we made groups to generate questions, reviewed them as team, and made different groups to further create questions. At exactly 10:54, we inserted the 75th question into our tool; The first exam form is basically finished! We didn’t stop, and we didn’t slow down. At exactly 16:00 we switched to tech review mode. At 17:23, we could finally catch some deep breath. We’ve finally made it: 129 questions were gone through the insertion and tech-review steps and are now awaiting a proper language review.
Thanks to the team!
Personally, I’ve never thought that we’d basically create the first version of our new TYPO3 CMS Certified Developer Certification with five to seven people in two days. This is really a fantastic feeling and I’m thankful for all the awesome people that were there, giving their best! Thanks Tobias Hauser, Vanessa Helfenberger, David Höckele, Patrick Lobacher, Gernot Ploiner, and Mike Streibl! Also, many thanks again to Tobias Hauser and Arrabiata Solutions GmbH for hosting our two-day spring in the “fish tank” and providing us with buttered pretzels, non-buttered pretzels, cookies, and unlimited use of the coffee machine. You guys rock!
Next steps
How does it go on from here? The next steps are to get the questions language reviewed and then rated in terms of difficulty by multiple “Subject Matter Experts”, which is a two-step process on its own. In parallel, we’re working on new certification print templates and usable logos/badges for both the integrator and the developer certification. Also, our certification pages need a content lifting and a complete restructuring to provide all possible candidates with all required information.
Want to get certified?
Do you want to be one of the first TYPO3 CMS Certified Developer? If this is the case, simply drop us an empty email with the subject “Certified Developer” to <link developer>certification@typo3.org and you’ll get notified as soon as the exam can be taken!
