Certification and SRA

Guys,

As somebody who works for SRA America there's two things I'd like to share with you that I hope will add to the discussion in regards to PostgreSQL testing and certification.

First off; SRA Japan and SRA America, are two distinct business units in the same corporation who have different objectives. SRA Japan has been running PostgreSQL courses on its home turf (Japan) for the last couple of years now. However, the most recent developments that I've been part of has to do with the New York branch where we've recently ported the Japanese courseware to English. SRA America is now running PostgreSQL courses for the North American market.

The second fact that I want to bring up concerns PostgreSQL certification itself. The challenge we face is that at this time there is no community derived certification for PostgreSQL. But.... in my opinion (I'm not speaking for the company now folks) certification is valid and worthwhile when the standards it follows has been developed on a community/consensual basis. So do how we develop a standard that will be of high quality and accepted by the community?

It so happens that I'm fairly close to another community project, several SRA America people are involved in, called the BSD Certification Group, http://bsdcertification.org. They are successfully developing a world-wide certification standards for all the BSD variants.

Many of you BSD people know the BSD certification debates. Much of what's been discussed here, are exactly the same issues discussed there.

The point I want to make is .... this group is suceeding .....

The secret to their success is the "process" and excellent "documentation". There are ten people in the group. They coordinate the debates and policy implementation. They issued an online survey that got people to say what they thought was important in a BSD standards. This is no small survey; it takes two hours to fill out and they had the survey translated into a number of languages. In the first two weeks they had recieved over 2,000 completed surveys. They've recently issued their Task Analysis Survey Report,http://bsdcertification.org/downloads/sr1_links.pdf, and it's a whopping 144 pages long. And just yesterday they published their Certification Roadmap, http://bsdcertification.org/downloads/BSDCertificationRoadmap.pdf.

The group finds itself getting support from all over the world. In the past seven months the group's chair has been invited to speak at conferences in North America, Europe, South America (even a group in India wants to bring her over) about what they are doing.

It is the BSD Certification Group's intention of documenting a how-to of what it will take for an opensource community to create a standards body similar to what they've done.

Comments?

Robert Bernier