Do you want to certify someone's mastery of S/W dev techniques? Or their compliance with a S/W dev process? Or establish S/W standards for deliverables? Fran

Do you want to certify someone's mastery of S/W dev techniques? Or their compliance with a S/W dev process? Or establish S/W standards for deliverables? Frankly only a guild cares whether you're a master craftsman. I see greater value to customers in the latter two, especially if S/W products were held to a standard of 'quality', esp efficacy and reliability. Then the S/W dev process could adopt a quality assurance process like that of housing construction, in which a building code exists and defines metrics of product performance that must be met by the builder through iterative inspections and a formal compliance process. Should such a process exist for all software? No. But I believe it should for some software products, like those in automobiles, medical devices, and essential infrastructure, etc. Do such formal dev processes benefit from their practitioners having some sort of formal certification themselves? Probably not. It's the process and product that's needs certification, not the craftsman.